


These Days of Dust

by fiorediloto



Series: The Earth Below My Feet [3]
Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Missing Scene, Mutual Pining, Period Typical Attitudes, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-14
Updated: 2019-08-22
Packaged: 2020-07-27 07:57:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 30,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20042566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiorediloto/pseuds/fiorediloto
Summary: Nix believed in luck, and most days he'd call himself a lucky man. After all, luck had saved his life and got him Dick Winters.That didn't mean that he was going to stroll into combat with a pierced helmet or believe that Dick would tag along indefinitely just because of Nix's pretty eyes.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Sequel to [Lend Me Your Heart](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19141585). Much like the rest of this series, this fic is based heavily on Dick Winter's _Beyond Band of Brothers_ and Larry Alexander's _Biggest Brother _(with some help from Stephen Ambrose's _Band of Brothers_). The books are treated as fictional works complementary to the series, and none of this is about the real-life veterans or the people close to them.
> 
> At this point I'm kind of at a loss as to how to thank my beta-reader [Impala_Chick](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Impala_Chick/pseuds/Impala_Chick) for the fantastic job she does time after time with my fic. You are the best. Also thanks to [ThrillingDetectiveTales](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThrillingDetectiveTales/pseuds/ThrillingDetectiveTales) for pre-reading and commenting and generally being a sweetie.
> 
> \---  
Title and opening quote from Mumford and Sons' _I Will Wait_.  


_These days of dust which we've known_  
_Will blow away with this new sun_

** _30 September 1943, Aldbourne_ **

“I don’t remember.”

“How’s that even possible?”

“I guess it wasn’t a big deal.”

“Everyone remembers their first time. How old were you, anyway?”

“Mm. I’m gonna say thirteen.”

“Are you telling me that your folks didn’t have a car until ’31? All farmers had one.”

“For the last time, Nix, we’re not farmers. We’ve never been farmers.”

“Still.”

“We didn’t need one.”

“What does _needing_ have to do with anything?”

“Everything, when you don’t have the money.”

Nix scoffed. He shook his cigarette in the ashtray sitting on his lap. “All right, spare me the sad tune. What about driving? First time driving.”

“Practice drive or on my own?”

“I don’t know, either. Both.”

Dick wriggled his sock-clad feet. He was lying on his cot, legs crossed at the ankles. Nix was sitting by his side on Mrs. Barnes’ hand-knit rug.

“First time on my own, I went on a grocery run.”

Nix snorted. “I’m on the edge of my seat.”

“It was nice,” Dick replied, nudging the back of Nix’s head with his knee. “I paid for the gas with money from my first wage.”

There was a quiet pride to Dick’s voice, the memory of a past accomplishment making him sound almost nostalgic.

“Before driving back I stopped for ice cream. It wasn’t on my way, so I didn’t tell anyone. It was good.”

“You rascal,” Nix smirked, looking over his shoulder. Dick was smiling. Nix turned around, taking a puff off his cigarette.

“Mine was in France. We spent a summer in Côte d’Azur in—mm, ’34 or ’35. Friend of mine stole his father’s Bugatti and we went driving around the countryside. You would’ve liked it. All small towns and fields. Cattle everywhere.”

“It does sound pretty,” Dick said, smile transferring nicely to his voice.

“Until we got lost and out of gas and out of money, and they had to send someone to pick us up. Stanhope was not thrilled.”

“Did you get in trouble?”

“Oh yeah,” Nix chuckled. “Big time. I didn’t see my friend for the rest of the summer. Father decided that he was a bad influence.”

“Little did he know.”

“Mm.” Nix bent his neck backwards, nape resting lightly on Dick’s thigh. He took another puff, exhaling slowly up towards the ceiling. “I guess Father thought he liked me a little too much.”

Dick’s thigh flexed under his head, a contraction and a slow release. “And did he?”

Nix shrugged. “Who can tell with the French? They’re too busy kissing you half the time anyway,” he declared breezily.

Dick was silent after that, and Nix quickly ran the conversation over in his mind, searching for an unwitting offense. Having found none, he risked a glance to his right. Dick didn’t look offended—pensive, rather.

“What is it?”

“Oh, nothing.”

_Nothing_, he’d said, the little tease.

“Come on.”

Dick’s smile was downright flirtatious now. “I’m just seeing it. Poor kid steals his dad’s car to impress his handsome friend, and all the while said friend just sits there blabbering of—I don’t know, I’m guessing motors and booze. Tragic.”

A glint in his eyes promised, _Believe me, Lewis, I’ve seen it all_, and not for the first time Nix found himself thinking, _Who the hell is this person I’m mixing with_, and, _How have I never noticed before_, and, _What else is in there that I’ve never noticed_.

He turned around properly now, putting down the ashtray on the floor and killing his cigarette stub in it.

“Flattering won’t get you anywhere,” he warned, a blatant lie, since his ego could feed on a compliment from Dick Winters for weeks.

“That’s all right. I’m quite happy where I am right now,” Dick said, managing to sound matter-of-fact and warm at the same time. 

“Come on, another one,” he said next, steering Nix back to their original conversation. “Hit me.”

Nix thought for a second. “First time on a plane?”

“Like you don't know the answer? Now you’re trying to get smacked,” Dick smiled.

“Hey, no need to be so touchy. First movie? There’s a movie theater in Lancaster, right?”

“There is. That’d be _Tom Sawyer_,” Dick answered. “It was good. I liked Huck Finn.”

“I know that one,” Nix said, his mind conjuring the black-and-white image of a lanky rascal with a mop of dark hair. His sister’s nanny had taken Blanche and he’d tagged along, because at the time he still followed her everywhere like a lovesick puppy. He didn’t remember much about the plot, but he did remember the enormous box of popcorn they’d all shared. Céleste’s fingertips had been soft and covered in a fine layer of salt.

“He died in that car crash, didn’t he?”

“Who, Huckleberry Finn?”

“Yeah. A few years back. Fell off a cliff or something.”

“Oh,” Dick said. “I didn’t know that.” He looked genuinely sad to hear it, almost as if he’d known him personally. “I haven’t been to many pictures after that.”

“I have,” Nix said. He patted himself for another cigarette, only to find that he was fresh out. In truth what he was aching for was a sip of something, cigarettes working as a mere detente, but he’d refilled his flask under Dick’s eyes that very morning—it came from his footlocker, after all—and he didn’t want to do it again on the same day. Plus he’d promised Harry he’d join him at the pub after Mrs. Barnes’ evening tea, and that was just about—he glanced at his watch—damn, not for another twenty minutes.

Dick pointed at the two unopened cartons sitting on the bookshelf, and Nix got on his feet with a deep groan because after a long while on Mrs. Barnes’ extremely soft, extremely hand-knit rug his body felt like a collection of rusty parts. But by the time he’d got there he realised that he didn’t want a smoke, after all, and walked back stretching his arms. This time he went straight to the cot. Dick bent his legs to make room and Nix sat with his back to the wall, the spartan bed dipping heavily under their combined weight.

“What was I saying?”

“Movies.”

“Ah, yeah. That’s where you took girls when the parents were a little—anxious. It reassured them, God knows why. The two of you alone in a dark room.”

“Yeah, I never figured that one out myself.”

Nix frowned with mild surprise, to which Dick reacted by getting a little bit of color to his cheeks. It was interesting, the list of things that could or could not make him blush. On the ‘yes’ pile: dirty sex talk, dating girls. On the ‘no’ pile: full nudity, sucking Nix’s cock.

He didn’t have it all down yet.

“I’ve taken girls out, Nix,” Dick said, and of course once he’d said it it was obvious. Dick Winters, eighteen or nineteen years old, hair parted with a ruler, hands calloused by honest work, en route to a college degree, or a successful business, or both; saintly, solid, marriable. He would have had flocks of respectable girls pining to be taken out, flocks of respectable parents eager to push their daughters into his arms.

Not a single problem with that.

“And?” Nix couldn’t stop himself from asking.

“And what?”

“I mean—” He struggled, making an empty gesture with his hand. He was curious, but turn-the-other-cheek notwithstanding, Dick _could_ be very touchy. “Just wondering. Did you like it?”

“It was all right,” Dick answered easily, but didn’t venture to add further details. There was the lightest frown between his eyebrows, like he was conjuring up a faded memory or a puzzling thought.

“Not awkward?”

“Of course it was awkward, Nix. They were girls,” Dick replied with a thin smile.

Nix scoffed. “You know what I mean.”

“I know what you’re not asking, yes.”

Nix looked up at the roof of the room, which was in dire need of some anti-mold treatment and a fresh coat of paint. From downstairs they could hear Mrs. Barnes wash the dishes and Mr. Barnes’s radio play a popular tune in the sitting room.

He looked down to find Dick’s long feet sitting on the bed close to his thigh, though not quite touching it, wrapped in the tan regulation socks.

“Summer of ’36. There was this rather forward girl who waited tables at a _brasserie _in Montparnasse.” He flashed up a glance at Dick’s face. “And I didn’t know anything, right? I thought that I was supposed to _court_ her. You know, bring her flowers. Which I did. A lot of them. Kind of a waste. Should’ve stuck to the cash.”

“She _didn’t_—”

“She did. She did present the bill at the end,” Nix said, remembering the absurd, horrible realization that had dawned on seventeen-year-old Lewis at that point. And then he laughed heartily, because twenty-five-year-old Nix found it funny and somewhat deserved, his doe-eyed innocence being rewarded by the inevitable heartbreak—and besides, he would never believe in romance as much as he had back then, before everything had happened.

“Nix,” Dick shushed him, nudging his thigh with a foot. There was no more water running downstairs, and either the radio had been turned off or it had reached a break in the programming. Nix’s laughter might as well have been the only sound in the house, though really it was both of them laughing now.

“In hindsight, you know what they say. Better leave it to the professionals,” Nix sniffed.

“I’m sure you were well taken care of,” Dick agreed with a smile.

His foot was still touching Nix’s thigh, as if forgotten there, and Nix gave in to an impulse and put his hand on it. Dick didn’t resist, but his eyes shot up to the door, slowly descending on Nix’s face with a curious, wary look. The look said that Nix could not be trusted—which was true, he couldn’t, not with Dick and a bed in close proximity. To think that it hadn’t always been like that baffled him.

“The stairs creak,” Nix said, dragging his thumb on the instep of Dick’s foot, heel to toe.

Dick produced a small, pleased sigh and didn’t try to move, which was a sign of—something. Not lust, they’d dealt with that for the day. Softness, perhaps. Dick could be a little sappy at times, which is not to say that he would do something sappy, or God forbid un-Winters-like, but his basic Winters-ness would be wrapped in a softer padding, rough edges and all, like china in a box.

Emboldened by the small victory, Nix pushed his fingers under the hem of Dick’s trousers leg and rubbed Dick’s ankle for a second. It was by far the strangest form of intimacy they’d experienced to date.

“It’s your turn,” he said at length.

“What?” Dick asked.

“Your first time.”

“Rather not.”

Nix looked up. Dick wasn’t blushing, but he looked embarrassed all the same.

“Come on,” Nix said, taking his hand off. “Can’t be worse than a French whore with a hundred red roses on her table.”

“You _did _like her.”

“Oh, yeah.”

Dick let out a little air through his nose. Nix wasn’t normally one to force a confidence—if he wanted to know something, there were more subtle ways than headbutting a closed door—but he felt that left to his own devices, Dick would die stoically holding his past to his chest like a secret diary, and they could not have that, could they. Some days, days like this, Nix felt an urge to open him up and lay every little bit bare for inspection.

“Technically it’s still my birthday,” he dropped.

“You got your gift already,” Dick retorted. Which was true, and partly the reason why Nix was here now, not drinking and not smoking in Dick’s adoptive childhood bedroom, instead of out with Harry and the others, celebrating.

“Is there a rule against double gifts in the Winters household?”

“Not a rule, but we knew not to ask.”

Definitely, Nix wouldn’t have liked growing up in the Winters household.

“Well, I’m never one to brag.” Dick scoffed at that, but Nix plowed on, “but if you think you’re gonna shock me, you’re in for a disappointment.”

“It’s not shocking. It’s not much of a story either. I’m just—I’m not proud of it.”

So it wasn’t embarrassment, then. Nix thought long and hard and could not for the life of him remember the last time he’d seen Dick ashamed. Incensed, chagrined, humiliated even; never ashamed. The man didn’t _do _shame, no small feat when you’ve got a list of don’t’s as long as Florida.

“It can’t be that bad. I mean, if the fella was into it, and you were into it, then…”

Dick looked at him strangely, like he’d said something extremely stupid or extremely out of character, or both.

“Don’t give me that look. I’m trying to be modern here.”

Dick shook his head. “Just leave it.”

“All right, but I’ll have you know that confession is the cleansing of the soul.”

“I’m not a Catholic.”

“So? Neither am I.”

“Nix—”

“All right, all right.”

He patted Dick’s knee, and since he felt at least a little guilty for overstepping some unspoken boundaries he left his hand there, a meager peace offering.

Dick didn’t react right away, but eventually his left hand moved up and came to rest high on his thigh, fingertips pressing lightly on Nix’s pinkie.

They did hear the steps coming up from the foot of the stairs, and maybe it was Nix’s dry imagination going rampant, but it felt like Dick left his hand where it was for a few more seconds than was strictly advisable.

Needless to say, nothing untoward graced the long-sighted eyes of Mrs. Barnes, God bless her heart, when she finally knocked, timidly opened the door and asked:

“Lieutenant Winters, Lieutenant Nixon, would you like to come down and have a spot of tea?”

****  


** _6 June 1944, Sainte-Marie-du-Mont_ **

** **

Nix had never ridden a tank before. He’d climbed on vehicles during joint training with the Armored divisions and been inside the hull a few times, but those occasions had been few and far apart, and Nix’s time with the steel beasts more akin to a guided tour than a real interaction.

He’d definitely never ridden shotgun by the barrel, rifle in hand, while his tank triumphantly rolled into a liberated town. It was a first, and it felt good.

This particular M4 Sherman had been shooting for the whole night at Utah Beach, and even though the gun barrel was not smoking anymore, it still smelled of gunpowder, oil, dust, and something else that might be just in Nix’s mind: victory.

There were three men on the right-hand side of the road. Nix recognized Strayer immediately by the blond hair, and his heart leapt pleasantly when he realized that the man next to him was Dick. Even with the helmet on, he told him apart easily by the lanky frame and the distinct set of his shoulders. And God, that felt better than invading Europe, better than his childish pride at playing conqueror on a tank. _There you are_, he wanted to say. _Here’s your gift for staying alive._

“Going my way?” he called instead, trying hard not to show the full extent of his relief, and Dick smiled in response, a domino of tired wrinkles spreading upwards from his mouth to his eyes. Nix helped him up and Dick sat himself comfortably on the plate next to him, slinging one arm over the gun barrel and the other around Nix’s shoulders. It started as a friendly pat, but Dick didn’t move the arm afterwards, and Nix didn’t ask him to. Dick was smiling fully now, looking red-eyed and almost inebriated, like he’d spent the last thirty-six hours in a club rather than on the battlefield. Nix couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen him smile like that.

“It’s not my Caddy, but it’ll do,” Nix declared, shouting to be heard over the rumble of the engine and the clanking sound of the rolling tracks. He proudly patted the steel casing of the tank.

“I hope we got more than twenty-six of these in the country,” Dick replied, and Nix grinned widely.

“Damn right. Christ, Dick, you gotta see Utah Beach, it’s—” he started, before realizing what he was saying. “In hindsight, better not.”

Dick winced with sympathy. “That bad?”

“It’s not pretty, no.”

The M4 rolled on steadily after its companion, mashing the blood-red mud under its tracks.

“You know, I’ve never ridden a tank before,” Nix said conversationally.

“Me neither.”

“Day of firsts, uh?”

“What?” Dick asked over the noise.

“Day of firsts!”

“I guess so,” Dick replied, looking at Nix with that earnest, appraising gaze of his, the one that made Nix feel like his skin had turned see-through.

“Here,” Dick said, signalling to the driver through the visor. The tank commander emerged from the hatch, and Dick gave him instructions on where to fire. He and Nix jumped down as the two M4s strode forward, locked into a firing position, took aim with a slow rotation of the turret, and unhurriedly dropped a shower of rapid-fire shots on the German positions across the meadow of Brécourt Manor.

They covered their ears while the machine guns swept the treeline, sending branches and dust flying all over. After hearing so much of the enemy’s artillery battering down on their men, Nix found almost a poetic justice in the terrifying noise headed the other way, dead on a distant target that wasn’t one of their own. He turned to Dick with a grin on his mouth, already a half-formed joke on his tongue, but Dick wasn’t smiling.

“I’ll go check on Speirs,” Dick said, throwing the rifle over his shoulder. “Tell Strayer that the causeway is clear, will you.”

“You got it.”

Strayer had claimed the ground floor of the town’s post office as battalion headquarters. After a few hours of work on a copy of Dick’s map, Nix reported to the colonel that they had the area from Sainte-Marie-du-Mont to Carentan mapped for Kraut artillery down to the last bullet, safely stored his notes away, and called it a day.

Easy had dug in just out of town, under the shadow of a tall hedgerow that offered protection from sight but did nothing to block out the continuous singing of the German machine guns from across the field. Nix looked for Dick there first, but they told him that he hadn’t shown up yet. Backtracking to the Great War monument, Nix eventually saw a skinny, red-headed silhouette wander off towards the promenade that overlooked the causeway. 

Nix was the bearer of good news: the map was a godsend, as proven by the intel officer up at Division almost creaming his pants when Nix had given it to him. He thought the joke would at least be worth a smile, but Dick was distracted, too preoccupied with processing the events of the day. Nix couldn’t blame him. It wasn’t a task that he intended to undertake sober, not any time in the near future at least. He’d bottle it up for now, leave it for an easier day, and even then he’d probably smooth the edge with as much booze as he could safely pour into his body.

But Dick was not like him, and even supposing that he’d let Nix help, Nix wouldn’t have known how. He almost made the mistake of mentioning that Easy’s XO wasn’t responsible for the casualties of Able Company, but stopped himself right before the words left his mouth. Dick wouldn’t have forgiven him.

In the end he decided to leave him to his own devices and head back to the square. Before he’d gone too far he couldn’t help throwing one last backward glance over his shoulder.

Dick had taken off his helmet and knelt down next to an Army jeep at the end of the promenade. Far into the distance, over the causeways, not so far that they couldn’t make out the pillars of smoke surging from the burning buildings, eastern Normandy was aflame.

Nix didn’t pray anymore. He had given the whole faith business more than a fair try in his day, and soon found out that he liked things that made empirical sense, dots that he could connect. He wasn’t a man for mystical contemplation.

But if, after all, it turned out that God existed, Nix hoped that He wouldn’t be too put off by Dick’s minor slips and deny him whatever small mercies he was asking for. 

They would need all the help they could get.

****  


** _13 June 1944, Carentan_ **

** **

“What’s with the limp?”

Dick threw his musette bag on the bed and let himself fall heavily next to it. His body sunk in the saggy mattress like a knife through butter, and he let out a deep, throaty sigh that was a touch too polite to be called a groan, though it certainly didn’t lack the intention. Nix turned around in his chair to give the other man an appraising look. 

Dick looked pale and dirty and exhausted, which didn’t worry Nix in the least. The open tongue of his left boot and the loose fold of his trouser leg, on the other hand, were alarmingly out of character for a guy who made a point of shaving and combing his hair even when he couldn’t shower.

Dick lied still with his arms along his body, eyes closed, chest softly moving up and down in long, measured breaths. Whatever reason had prompted him to drag himself all the way over to Nix’s billet, he didn’t seem to be in a hurry to get to it.

“Dick?”

“Ricochet,” came Dick’s voice from the depths of the mattress.

“You had Doc take a look at it?”

“Yeah.”

“What did he say?”

Dick draped an arm over his eyes, seemingly to block out the light coming from the lamp on Nix’s desk. It was a girly thing, an abat-jour with a lilac shade Nix had repurposed from bed to desk lamp when studying the maps on the saggy mattress had started to give him a crick in the neck. He wondered where the real desk lamp was, as a darker circle on the sun-discolored surface of the table declared it missing. He suspected that the rather well-off French family he was billeted with had removed everything even of marginal value before giving up their daughter’s bedroom to the scary-looking _Américain. _The thought amused him, firstly because he didn’t fancy himself particularly scary and second because, if he wouldn’t put it past himself to pinch the occasional bottle of Merlot, modern electrical appliances weren’t high on his list of _desiderata_.

“Dick? What did Doc say?” Nix prodded, throwing a glance backwards.

“To stay off it.”

“How many miles ago was that?”

“Don’t know. Feels like I’ve been running in circles for the past two days.”

Nix rested his arm on the back of his chair, half-twisting his body to take in Dick’s slack frame.

“Don’t get me wrong, but why are you here?”

Dick pulled himself up slowly. “You’re the only battalion officer within three miles. Thought I might as well report to you.”

“Sure,” Nix said, ignoring the biting edge to Dick’s voice and the dreary sarcasm that made it sound like someone else’s. He wouldn’t deny Dick the right to a touch of Nixon-esque bitterness; he just hadn’t thought that it would come so soon.

“Nine wounded today. That’s eighteen since yesterday. Nineteen with Tab.”

Nix allowed himself a tiny smirk, but Dick didn’t seem in the mood to laugh about the stabbing of one of his men, as amusing as the ’bayonet incident’ might be in hindsight.

“The rest all right?”

“Yeah, they’re billeted in houses around town. The locals didn’t make much of a fuss. And many were empty in the first place.”

“They’re warming up to us,” Nix agreed.

“Are they treating you well?” Dick asked, taking a look around himself.

Nix shrugged. “They stay out of the way. I chatted with the lady some. She reminds me of my mother.”

“In what way?”

“Stuck-up bitch.”

“Nix,” Dick reprimanded him, necessarily, but he was fighting down a smile. “It’s a nice place you got here,” he observed, letting his eyes wander over the pastel-colored wallpaper, the ornate writing desk and padded chair Nix was sitting on, the flowery coverlet dressing the bed. A general overabundance of softer colors and floral details gave the room a childish look, though Nix had, on occasion, been admitted into grown-up ladies’ bedrooms with a similar flair. “Very—romantic.”

“Yeah, right? I think it suits me,” Nix grinned.

Dick’s eyes finished their round and slowly focused back on Nix’s face. “Battalion headquarters are pretty nice too,” he said, but Nix scoffed. 

“What would I do in Angoville-au-Plain?” he replied, the French nasal vowels rolling pleasantly on the back of his tongue. “Barely any nightlife. Can’t compare with Carentan, the gem of Normandy.”

“That what they call it?”

“This godforsaken shithole?”

That got a chuckle out of him. Nix pocketed it, pleased, even as it was short-lived. A ghost of a smile lingered on Dick’s lips for a second longer, then quickly dried up.

“They pulled out,” Dick said in a quiet voice, right hand clenching and unclenching into a fist. “Dog and Fox. Left us there under the fire.”

“Yeah.” Nix had followed the counterattack at a distance, the officer keeping his cool by necessity while the man inside struggled with outrage and a cold, sticky fear that just wouldn’t relent. Through his binoculars he’d seen Dick’s helmet peek above the hedgerow and then Dick’s whole body stand within range of the machine guns, the silver bar that marked him a First Lieutenant glinting attractively on his collar. “Keep firing, keep firing,” he’d been shouting, the words inaudible but the intention clear. Nix had gritted his teeth over and over, chewing emptily until his jaw had started to hurt.

“Easy did great.”

“We had our orders,” Dick replied, shunning the compliment. “You can’t just leave, can you.” He shook his head. “Nine wounded. I wonder—”

“Don’t,” Nix stopped him. “And if it’s any consolation, Mulvey’s head is gonna roll. Strayer lost his shit today. Haven’t seen him this pissed since his London mistress gave him the sack.”

“Demoted?” Dick asked, frowning.

“Off to Division.”

Dick nodded, as if accepting that the punishment was commensurate to the fault. Which was funny, really, as there weren’t many who wouldn’t have given their right arm for that balcony seat on the war that was division headquarters. Not Dick, though; and neither the now-former CO of Fox Company.

Dick bent over his wounded leg, wincing as he undid the loose strings of his boot and carefully pulled it off. The cut had bled through the bandage. Dick took off the sock and untied the gauze, carefully starting to unravel it. When he got to the inner layer, the one that had soaked up the blood and was now glued to the wound, he took a deep breath and grabbed one side of it with the opposite hand, as if he intended to rip it off like a band-aid.

“Jesus, not like that. Let me,” Nix said quickly, moving over to the edge of the bed. “Scoot up,” he commanded, stealing the bandage from Dick’s hand and gesturing for him to crawl up the bed. Then he grabbed Dick’s foot and pulled it on his lap.

“Thanks,” Dick sighed with obvious relief, leaning back on his hands.

“Why didn’t you ask a medic to change your dressing?” Nix asked, pulling very gently at the edges of the bloody clot to see if it gave.

“It’s just a scratch. I can manage.”

“Not with those farmer’s hands, you can’t,” Nix snorted, peeling the gauze away bit by bit until he met a stronger resistance at the very center of the wound. “Give me the canteen,” Nix said, pointing at the nightstand.

“I’ve got sulfa in my bag,” Dick tried to object, looking skeptical, but Nix rolled his eyes.

“It’s water. I’m not disinfecting you with whiskey, you savage.”

Once it was wetted down, the gauze gave up more easily, and after a few careful tugs Dick’s wound was out in the open. It was mostly clean and not too deep, Nix noticed with relief, but it looked like it had been poked at, and he suspected it hurt like hell.

Nix reached for Dick’s musette bag and took the sulfa powder out of the first-aid kit, then he sprinkled a generous amount on the cut, which was a little roughed-up after tearing off the bandage. Dick sucked in a breath and tensed up when the disinfectant touched the exposed bits. “There, there,” Nix coddled him. “You’re doing great, son.”

Dick sighed again, very softly this time, and bent his arms backwards, allowing his weight to rest more comfortably on his elbows. “If I didn’t know you, I’d say you’re enjoying this.”

“Sure I am. Your smelly foot is a dream.”

“Excuse me if I haven’t had time to shower. Been a little busy trying to stay alive.”

“With mediocre results, it seems.”

Nix took a fresh roll of gauze from the kit and started dressing the wound the way they’d been taught in training, with the first end sticking out under the first round of bandage.

“That was just stupid,” Dick admitted, voice turning sour. “I was standing there in plain sight like a fool.”

“Was it earlier today?”

“Yesterday, in town.”

Nix tried hard not to think of a hundred different outcomes for that scene, not to play them out in his mind in some idiotic game of what-if’s. Most of them did not end with a minor leg wound.

“Remember that time Sobel had to play casualty for the medics’ training?” he said instead, because that was a much better line of conversation than considering his friend slaughtered like cattle in the middle of the road.

“Oh yes,” Dick smiled, in that covert way he had of smiling when he found something amusing that he knew he should not.

“Jesus, how long was the cut? Inch, two inches—?”

“They called it an appendectomy,” Dick supplied, making a more valiant effort at suppressing his smile. “That could’ve gone all sorts of wrong.”

“It didn’t, though,” Nix replied lightly. “No harm done. Okay, _some_ harm done. But you gotta admit, it makes for a great story.”

“It does. Better than my ankle, at least.”

“Don’t sell yourself short. You might be limping on a Purple Heart here.”

Dick made a face, like the prospect of being awarded a medal for the wound was only slightly less painful than getting it in the first place. The face and the idea were so quintessentially Wintersian that Nix felt immediately at home, and better than he’d felt in a week.

He tugged gently at the newly tied knot and hummed with satisfaction at a job well done. “There you go,” he said, patting Dick’s knee. “Good as new.”

“Thank you, Lew.”

Dick put his foot down and flexed the ankle around, trying out the resistance of the bandage. Happy with the result, he reached for his boot and carefully slipped it back on.

“You should let it rest,” Nix said with a sideways glance. “Get your weight off it for a while.”

“You sound like Roe.” He checked his watch, and Nix did too, out of reflex. It was well past zero-two-hundred. Nix was still fully awake and with a couple of hours to spare, but he admittedly had a weirder sleep cycle than most. “Gotta get back to Harry.”

“Knowing him, he’s snoring already.” Nix tipped his chin at the bed. “Stay here.”

Dick turned his head to look where Nix had pointed, as if he might have missed it the first time. It was a single bed with a single pillow. There were tiny pink roses printed on the pillowcase.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” he said quietly. 

“Why not?” Nix replied, piqued by Dick’s rejection.

Dick’s face took on the same sheepish, apologetic expression he’d donned when he’d given Nix the Talk.

“What?” Nix pressed, a snarky edge making its way into his voice—a sign of weakness, he knew, and one that Dick would recognize, but he couldn’t stop himself. “You fear for your honor?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“No, it’s fine. Quite right. You let your guard down, who knows the things I might do.”

“Nix, come on,” Dick replied softly, touching his arm. “Don’t put words in my mouth.”

Nix bit the inside of his cheek despondently, but for all his claiming that Nix had misunderstood, Dick didn’t elaborate further. He didn’t move his hand either, and after a little while he gave Nix’s arm a gentle squeeze that for some reason made it all worse. 

As if Nix had offered anything, he thought bitterly. As if he was going to pine behind a closed door like a dog.

“Well then,” Nix said, shaking himself back into action. He walked to the desk, collected the holster with his sidearm tucked inside and strapped it on with the casual efficiency of everyday practice. He hung his binoculars around his neck and grabbed his field jacket from the back of the chair, though it was rather warm outside. He patted the inner pocket for his hip flask and the cigarettes. Reassured that all was where it should be, he looked back up at Dick. “You can stay or leave. I’m going out.”

“Where to?”

“Recon. I’m gonna go take a look at those hedgerows.”

“Alone?”

Nix smirked. Dick’s concern was genuine, and sound too, but the motherly quality of the question made Nix feel like shrugging it off was the only possible reaction. Of course he’d go alone; he worked better alone. And besides, after a hell of a day he wouldn’t wake up a dead-tired private to play escort any more than Dick would wake up a medic to change his dressing.

“You coming?” Nix asked, and Dick nodded, gingerly getting on his feet. He transferred some weight onto his injured ankle, lips pressed tight, and steadied himself.

Out in the street, the air was still warm and humid. Nix took a deep breath and caught a whiff of gunpowder in the wind. Far in the south-west, over the newly established front, German machine guns reactivated as if on cue, dropping a perfunctory hail of bullets on the line.

Nix headed in that direction, and Dick followed with the kind of soft, controlled limp that Nix imagined would come back to him in his old age, when arthritis or the old wound—at that point barely a thin, hairless blemish on the skin—woke up to bother him. He followed the idea in his mind, pictured a grey head with a dash of white at the temples, a higher hairline and proper wrinkles. He would be one of those lean, athletic gentlemen who ran ten miles every day well into their sixties and climbed on the roof to fix a loose tile, with clean nails and an immaculate shave. He’d be a pillar of the community, head of the parish council or something such, a beloved sage who’d seen the war and knew all there was to know. The girls of his youth, now mothers and grandmothers, would sigh with regret at his passage, only to later come over to exchange cake and a chat for whatever small favor was social currency in rural Pennsylvania: a summer job for their youngest, a helping hand for their bedridden husband. Even kids wouldn’t dare to sneak in and steal Mr. Winters’ apples; he’d probably just give them out to anyone who asked politely enough. And he would have someone, Nix figured, a farmer’s wife with Dutch blond hair and a pretty nose that burned and peeled under the sun, or—

His train of thought stopped abruptly. Dick was regarding him with a quizzical look, and Nix realized that he’d been staring. Averting his eyes, he patted himself for the cigarettes.

“What is it?” Dick asked.

“Thinking of retirement,” Nix mumbled around the filter. “I just got this idea of buying a house on the sea and going sailing on weekends.”

“Early retirement?”

“As early as possible, _bien sûr_.”

They kept on. Dick’s limp had been incorporated in a steady, if a little slow pace and didn’t look so pronounced anymore.

“Never been much of a seaman,” Dick confessed. “Can’t see the appeal.”

“It’s fine,” Nix replied, knocked sideways by a pain in the pit of his stomach he attributed to the chow, though part of him knew that he was just fooling himself, and poorly so at that. “I wasn’t going to take you.”

****  


** _11 July 1944, English Channel_ **

** **

Nix was by no means an anxious man nor an easily scared one, but he could at least understand—if not partly share—the men’s apprehension in getting on the LST that would take them back to England.

Tank landing ships were slow and clunky: fat, easy targets with a belly full of men. One had been sunk by a torpedo three days into the invasion; another hit by a mine at Utah Beach while the 506th sweated outside Carentan. To top it off, it hadn’t been that long since the 101st had crossed the Atlantic on another troop ship, men packed like sardines in the hull, officers slightly better off in the stuffy, smelly cabins. It was only half a joke that the paratroops would rather take off on a plane headed to the line than on a ship sailing away from it.

This didn’t stop the men, after the initial reluctance, from enjoying the welcome change of scenery. The weather was hot in the morning, mild in the evening, and the general mood was such that nobody would care to enforce the nominal curfew that wanted everyone back in their berths by twenty-one-hundred. 

“Sobel would turn in his grave,” Nix commented, checking out the couples and triplets of raucous troopers hanging above deck. A group of four from D Company had somehow gotten their hands on an illicit bucket of ice cream and were sitting in plain sight with the loot, digging in in turns with the one spoon. Navy and Army officers alike came and went, eyeing the scene with disapproving looks, but nobody bothered telling them off.

“He’s still alive,” Dick pointed out.

“Don’t I know,” Nix replied. “Bumped into him every single time I went up to regiment. Took all the joy out of it.”

“The joy of going up to regiment?” 

“They had warm showers,” Nix sniffed, pushing his Ray-Bans up the bridge of his nose.

Dick hummed a vaguely condescending sound. He looked queasy from the boat but better than he had for a while, thanks to a few days of rest and Easy being pulled off the line. He looked like he’d managed to sleep for longer than half an hour on end and for more than one night in a row, slumber finally undisturbed by the roar of the German machine guns.

Sleeping in Carentan had been a joke, a wish. Nix could sleep through an earthquake, but in Carentan sleep had started eluding him, chased off by the erratic patterns of Kraut artillery going on and off at intervals. It was on purpose, Nix knew that, a simple harassing strategy to keep the enemy on their toes—though he had to wonder if it didn’t vex the German men as much as it did theirs—but knowing it hadn’t helped one bit. He had tossed and turned for hours in his ridiculous girl’s bed with the pink roses and the frilly metalwork, finally solving the problem by giving up night sleep altogether. It had worked surprisingly well, all things considered.

Now, with the French coastline receding steadily behind the stern of the ship and the ocean wind blowing salty and fresh on their faces, it was almost too easy to pretend that it had all been some sort of elaborate dream, the kind with a labyrinthine plot that went round and round and didn’t resolve itself. You had to admit that, upon a closer look, some of it looked rather fantastical. That bit with twelve men taking down a battery of .88s? The stuff of fables.

“Any plans for your furlough?” Dick asked, interrupting his thoughts. The tone was careful enough that Nix could tell the other half-expected to be told off, which was new, since Nix had always been rather prodigal with information on his private life. But some things had changed since D-Day minus six, and maybe this—how careless they could afford to be with each other’s privacy—was one of them.

“Nothing much,” he answered, which was mostly a lie, but then again he didn’t feel like elaborating.

Dick nodded in mute acceptance. Nix had a feeling that there was more to this thread than small talk, but before he could prod, Dick turned his head to acknowledge Harry who was crossing the deck with the shuffling, unaccustomed step of the infantryman at sea. Perhaps aided by a drink or three, Nix thought, noticing the way Dick’s fingers discreetly moved the sleeve cuff away to check his watch. Though to be fair it was almost supper time already, and anyway nobody gave a damn if an officer allowed himself a little_ aperitivo_, not even Dick, not today.

“I hate ships,” Harry declared once he was within earshot. He looked a little green around the gills.

“Hey, at least the weather’s nice,” Nix offered. “Remember day three on the troop ship? The storm?”

“I don’t want to,” Harry groaned, leaning with his elbows on the rail. He must have realized that he wasn’t doing himself any favors by looking down at the waves rolling under the keel, because he hastily turned around.

“I’m seeing things today. I could swear that an Army motorcycle and sidecar got aboard earlier, pushed by one of our men. More, I think it was?”

He threw Dick a glance that was a pure distillate of Welshy understatement, heavy-lidded and lazy, with just the right twinkle in his eye to give away that he knew exactly what this was all about.

“Cute,” Nix guffawed.

Dick pursed his lips. “That’s funny. I was standing at the door the whole time, checked every man in myself.”

“And you didn’t see a thing.”

“Not a thing,” Dick confirmed, with such a beautiful poker face that Nix wondered if Dick hadn’t been pulling his leg all along about being lousy at the game. Surely a face like that must be worth something at the gambling table.

“You know,” Nix said, letting his eyes wander again towards the happy quartet of misfits and their bucket of ice cream, “I heard that Sink’s putting Sobel up for a promotion.”

“Oh yeah?” Dick said, mouth now twitching with unmistakable humor. “What would that be?”

“Regimental S-4.”

Harry burst into laughter, and also Nix gave into a chuckle. Probably there were more amusing things to laugh about, but right now, in the middle of war, regimental supply officer Herbert Sobel hopelessly looking for the whereabouts of a stolen motorcycle seemed a pretty good one.

“Hell, Dick. This guy I gave up on a long time ago,” Harry wiggled a derisory thumb at Nix, (“Hey, hey!” Nix protested), “but you were supposed to be the serious one.”

“You got it backwards, Harry-boy,” Nix declared. Dick cast him a sideways glance and finally released the smile that had been tugging at the corners of his mouth, and even though Harry had initiated the conversation Nix felt that it was a private smile just for him. “I’m the only thing that holds Captain Winters back from a life of mischief.”

Dick’s smile froze a little but stayed in place, like there was some point to be made by keeping it on.

After K and D-rations and the pathetic excuse for a camp mess at Utah Beach, the hot food of the ship canteen was a dream. Nix ate with an appetite he’d almost forgotten he could feel, a gusto for food that was more than a simple biological need, and when the hunger started to be sated and the snobbish part of his brain started whispering that the food was really not that good, he silenced it like he would an impertinent brat and kept at it until his stomach was full. 

Dick was eating his ice cream with uncharacteristic slowness, spoon grazing the compact surface of the cup from side to side in orderly lines like a lawnmower, drawing up soft, curled shavings. He took time between each spoonful and the next, ice cream melting on his tongue, savoring it with an utterly contented face much like the one Nix himself made with a mouth full of good wine.

Wine they got too, at least the officers, a decent Merlot that might not be worth an ecstatic face, but was definitely good enough for a second, a third, perhaps even a fourth glass, if you were keeping score, which he wasn’t but had a feeling maybe Dick was, judging from the way his gaze would fall into sharper focus when Nix’s hand reached for the neck of the bottle.

In the end Dick excused himself early, as was his wont, while Nix and Harry bunched together with three Navy officers headed to the wardroom, and seasickness notwithstanding, proceeded to get methodically smashed.

One of them, a fellow Jersey man with a tolerance for alcohol that only got more and more impressive as the night progressed, seemed to take a shine to Nix, probably out of their common love of strong liquor and common hatred for their home state. The guy seemed to constantly hover at the edge of Nix’s field of vision, a freshly shaven, soft-smiled presence with a soothing voice and drink-red lips. By the third toast Nix had started noticing things he wasn’t entirely sure he was supposed to, like the faint scent of cologne that seeped into his nostrils when the guy moved just so, and by the fifth drink more and more things were begging to be noticed: the overly familiar way the guy seemed to appropriate Nix’s personal space, all bumping shoulders and hips and careless brushes on the way to the bottle, or the pleasant splash of red that had started coloring his cheeks, making them look nice and ruddy. A few more toasts, and Nix caught himself thinking that the guy seemed a decent-looking fella, the sporty, educated, clean-faced kind, a less annoying type of jock.

One by one the other officers dispersed, and Harry, long under the table, mumbled that he needed to take a piss and never came back from the latrines, if he made it that far.

Nix wasn’t sure of the time and turning his wrist to check his watch felt like a Herculean task, but he knew for a fact that they were way past curfew, because nominal or not, the club was empty and slowly shutting down.

“Welsh got lost,” the guy said, treacherously refilling Nix’s whiskey glass. Nix made to protest, but it was the end of the bottle, and it seemed impolite to refuse.

“He’s passed out in the hallway,” he sentenced. “They’ll find him busy smooching a fire extinguisher and calling it ‘Kitty.’”

The guy sniggered. “He talks about her a lot, doesn’t he.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Is she pretty?”

Nix had seen some pictures, so he nodded and said: “Very,” but immediately regretted it. Even through his drunken daze, it felt unsavory to be talking about your buddy’s fiancée’s graces with a near stranger.

“What about yours?” the guy asked, reaching out to Nix’s left hand and turning it back up under the light, a funny gesture at that, like he wanted to ascertain that the thing glinting on Nix’s finger was in fact a wedding band.

“Oh, she’s pretty,” Nix answered, looking down at the ring himself. His fingers were swollen from the alcohol, and the band looked viciously snug, like a noose around a neck. “Very pretty. A pretty, pretty whore.”

The crude obscenity of the word comforted him, as did the next gulp of whiskey. It felt good to call her names, he realized. He’d never let himself, not even in his mind. Perhaps he’d been wrong to deny himself for so long.

“Oh?” the guy said, hand retreating from Nix’s but lingering on the table in its vicinity. “Sorry to hear that.”

“It’s all right,” Nix frowned, finding his pleasure vaguely spoiled by the other’s sympathy. “You’re not married, are you? Good. Don’t. Way to ruin a perfectly good thing.”

“No,” the man said, voice dropping a little but turning firmer as it shed the easy, light-hearted tone it had donned so far. “I’m not the right sort.”

“Smart guy,” Nix pronounced him, touching his glass to the other’s before emptying it in one long swallow. The whiskey rolled down his throat with its usual sharp bite. Nix’s face got warm for a moment, cheeks hot as if he’d lain under the sun for too long.

The man’s eyes moved around the room, taking in the wardroom staff upturning the chairs on the tables to mop up the floor. Nix wondered idly why nobody was asking them to leave when they had so clearly outstayed their welcome, but then he remembered the Airborne patch on his sleeve and the leitmotif of the day: ‘Whatever you want, sir.’ He smirked.

“What’s funny?” the other man asked.

“War,” Nix replied. Because it was a little funny, wasn’t it. The Armed Forces, which upheld and guarded their own rules above everything, felt like cutting them slack for the sole reason that they’d been doing precisely what they’d been sent out to do, _virtue is its own reward _be damned. He thought of Dick and the motorcycle, and his smile grew. There was a good one-liner hidden in there somewhere; he needed to remember to look for it when he was sober.

“We’d better go,” the Navy guy said, and Nix almost replied that they didn’t have to do anything, not tonight, that Nix’s special immunity extended to his companion for as long as he said so.

“You feel like a nightcap?” the Navy man asked next, touching Nix’s elbow.

And sure, a nightcap sounded great, so Nix let himself be led through the narrow corridor and into the officers quarters.

The sailor unlocked a door marked with a small name tag (‘ENS Kelly, W.’) and let him in. The frugal comfort of the room reminded Nix of the troop ship, but he put the thought from his mind and focused instead on the back of the guy as he knelt down to open his footlocker, digging out a reddish, very promising bottle of liquor. 

“What’s the W stand for?” Nix asked.

“William.”

“Say, William—”

“Bill,” the man corrected, throwing Nix a smile over his shoulder.

“Say, Bill, what do you do on this fine vessel?” He had a mild feeling that he might have been told already, but there was something disturbing to the quiet room, and he’d rather have the same conversation twice than an unfamiliar silence.

The man hung the lock back on its hook, standing up with the bottle in his hands like a trophy. “Communications. You’re intel, aren’t you?”

“I am,” Nix said, feeling like he was admitting to belonging to some elite club.

“You like it?” 

“Yeah. I’m good at it.”

“I thought you’d be. You look the type.”

“What type?” Nix asked, frowning ever so slightly.

Bill Kelly made a gesture that meant that it was obvious, just by looking at Nix, what type of man he was. “The type who can keep a secret,” he answered with a straight face.

Nix chuckled. “Oh boy. You got no idea.”

The man gestured at the berth, which was neatly done with sharp corners that put OCS to mind. Nix wondered if the fold was six or seven inches long. He couldn’t tell by eye. He was sure that Dick could have. 

“Sit down. It’s not the Ritz,” the man warned, with an easy smile which made Nix wondered if he hadn’t inadvertently thrown in some braggy remarks at some point during the night.

“Beats the crew room,” Nix assured him, and then, since he suspected it had sounded a little patronizing, “It’s good. Plenty of space. You lot got your own rooms.”

“Officer’s privilege,” Kelly declared, passing Nix two tumblers and unscrewing the bottle with a swift, steadfast grip that told Nix that the guy was definitely the more sober between them. They clinked their glasses and downed their first sip in silence.

“Aren’t you supposed to be on shift or something?” Nix asked, resting his weight back on his free hand.

“Not for another couple hours,” the other man answered, leaning closer, until his right knee knocked softly against Nix’s left. Nix caught a fresh whiff of cologne, mixed with a musky, more intimate note. “We’ve got time.”

“Uh-huh.” Nix took another sip and licked his lips. “Long as we don’t end up treading on a sea mine because you fell asleep at the radio.”

Kelly smiled. “We’re too far already. You know,” Kelly continued, his hand wrapping gently around Nix’s fingers to pry away his glass and deposit it on the nightstand, “normally I don’t take guys here. Thought I’d make an exception.”

“God, you know how to charm a girl,” Nix smirked, half-considering reaching out for the glass again, but something in the other’s look gave him pause. Only for a moment, though, because then Kelly placed a warm hand on Nix’s knee and stroked his inner thigh with a thumb, making the whole picture very clear.

Nix didn’t stop him. The man had been working hard for it, after all, and Nix might not have known right at the beginning, but he had been suspecting for some time now. At some point during the night it had become more about seeing how the guy would get to it than about figuring out what he wanted.

Kelly leaned in with no hurry at all and cupped Nix’s face in his hand. He had long blond lashes that gave his eyes a pleasing, feminine quality. His breath smelled like whiskey, and Nix was reminded of his father with a whiplash of sensory memory that was painful, and almost prompted him to pull his head back like a recalcitrant horse. He stopped himself, though. Kelly tilted his head and his mouth landed on Nix’s, pressing a gentle, confident kiss which slowly rolled into a second and a third one. The guy exhaled softly through his nose on Nix’s cheek, then his breath stopped for a moment as the guy’s tongue lapped briefly at Nix’s lower lip, asking for something, and Nix thought, _What the hell_, and opened his mouth to let himself be kissed properly. Kelly’s fingers curled around the back of his neck, half hanging, half holding him in place.

“What do you like?” Kelly asked, throwing him a quick glance before his lips trailed to Nix’s jaw, to his neck, to his left ear that, neglected for too long, immediately went aflame with sensation.

Nix felt strangely detached from the whole experience, like he could afford to look at it from a purely intellectual angle—alcohol notwithstanding—and read it like he would a new map. There was something funny to the scene when you contemplated it from thirty feet above your body: the stranger half in his lap, hanging onto his body like Nix was the world’s least reliable buoy, mouth latched to his earlobe with a hint of teeth that put to mind an aggressive tropical fish. At some point during the proceedings a soft warning signal had started going off in Nix’s head, louder and louder the more he tried to ignore it. And there was a mild queasiness too, the gentlest hint of seasickness, though Nix knew for sure that it had nothing to do with the booze or the sea.

He thought of Dick then—almost a lie, this, implying that he hadn’t been thinking about him for most of the night, and most of his waking time since—God, who could tell anymore. But in the sloshy mess that was his mind, the swamp where Dick and Kathy and Mikey lingered like ever present ghosts, waiting for a chance to step forward and remind him that he indeed was the worthless piece of shit he’d been pronounced not once, but twice already, in the middle of all that Dick came into sharp focus, a voluntary act of Nix’s brain shedding light on itself and saying, _Here he is. Look at him, for God’s sake_.

And he did.

“You got a rubber?” Nix blurted out, voice rough from the heartburn grating at the back of his throat.

Bill Kelly smiled.

Some time later, Nix stood in front of a door a little down the hallway, steadying himself with both hands against the frame like he was afraid of collapsing. The corridor was perfectly quiet, except for the omnipresent hum of the machines and the light vibration of the deck under his feet. There was a gentle swaying to it too, the kind of slow-paced rotation one might impart to a glass of freshly poured wine to let it breathe. Funny thought, that, since Nix rather felt like he was suffocating.

When he deemed himself steady enough on his feet, he knocked on the door. That was when all started moving.

At first Nix thought the movement was just in his head, an old trick of the booze coursing through his veins. He was, after all, nothing but decimated. But then he realized that there was more to it than his vanquished sense of balance, and the bow of the ship was in fact lifting up, and none too slowly at that: throwing a look at the far end of the corridor he could see the floor had already risen with a visible inclination. Above his head, a loose light bulb started swaying back and forth from its cord like a hanged man, casting its fluttering yellow light all around. Nix saw his own shadow grow and shrink, skating liquidly from wall to wall. The ship tilted slightly to the side and the light bulb took on a crazy spin. Things went still for a moment, the ship sitting askew on its starboard and pausing as if to take a breath, and Nix grabbed the handle of the cabin door with both hands and braced himself for the inevitable as the breath of the ship turned into a majestic, terrifying sigh that shook it from bow to stern and made everything quiver and quake like the inside of a shaker. The handle rattled forcefully between Nix’s sweaty palms but he grabbed and refused to let go until the ship shuddered and bucked its head forward like an unruly horse, dragging Nix down with it, poor rider that he was. The stern slammed down into position and Nix fell flat on his back, defeated and breathless.

“Nix, are you all right?”

Nix pulled himself up on one elbow, shame washing over him at the sight of Dick’s naked calves.

“I’m sorry,” he croaked, but as he spoke he realized that the vibration was picking up again, the ship was again starting to tilt upwards and sideways. “Oh, for fuck’s sake—”

“Come inside. C’mon,” Dick said, helping him to his feet and into the dark room. He steered Nix to the berth, gently but with purpose. The door closed behind, cutting off the only source of light in the room.

Nix sat up with his back against the wall and closed his eyes. He could feel it even sitting down, the quivering, though not as strongly. A second later Dick stumbled gracelessly next to him, making the cot creak noisily in protest. He smelled a little, a faint layer of sweat over clean skin, but Nix had never been put off by a little sweat. He let his head drop on Dick’s shoulder, breathing in unashamedly.

“Hey,” Dick said.

“Mm.”

“What happened to your sea legs?”

“Ha,” Nix chortled. “Yachts don’t do _that_.”

“Well, that explains.”

“They don’t,” Nix insisted, like it mattered for some reason. “You’ll see. I’ll take you.”

Dick looked down, his chin brushing the top of Nix’s head. “Will you now.”

“Yes, yes. Of course.”

It was nice, being close like that. He’d sat like that with his French friend, that one time. They’d parked the Bugatti by the side of the road, climbed a short fence and wandered off into the fields until they’d found a tree that cast a wide and dark shadow, just the thing to counter the summer heat. They didn’t have a picnic blanket, nor food—Julien hadn’t planned that far. All they had was a bottle of a fine red, or what they thought was a fine red, and no glasses either. They’d taken turns drinking from the bottle, long eager gulps quickly turning into slow, drowsy sips as the heat and the alcohol got the best of them. Nix’s head had turned very heavy at some point, and Julien hadn’t seemed to mind having his shoulder used for support.

The ship vibrated everywhere: in the bed, in the walls, even inside Nix’s head. He held his breath as the LST slammed into the sea, making their bodies bounce on the berth and smack into each other. 

Dick exhaled forcefully. “This—_goddamned_ ship,” he groaned, and damn if it wasn’t cute, the cussing, like a young boy saying _poop_. “I’ve been sick all night.”

Nix chuckled.

“It’s not funny,” Dick chastised him, sounding mildly affronted.

It _was_ funny, of course. It was too good. Dick swearing? Christmas.

Nix felt a rush of affection gather in his stomach, the kind of fuzzy warmth that generally preluded a bad decision. He let his head slide lower on Dick’s chest and then he just sort of allowed his body to fall forward in a controlled motion, until the side of his face was resting in Dick’s lap, with his ear on the hem of Dick’s shorts and his cheek on the cool skin of his thigh.

“Nix—” Dick started, in that uncertain voice he used sometimes when he knew he had to resist but wasn’t going to do anything real about it. His hands hovered over Nix’s shoulders.

“Just for a minute,” Nix mumbled. Dick let out a sigh, and his hand resigned to landing softly on Nix’s back.

“It’s your fault,” Nix murmured.

“What is?”

“This. Me. I wasn’t like this before.”

He wasn’t like this when Julien had looked down on Nix’s face in his lap and beamed him an intoxicated smile. He’d said something, a few sweet French words whose meaning would be forever lost, and then he’d bent down to kiss Nix’s mouth.

Nix hadn’t kissed back, but he hadn’t smacked Julien in the face either, as he had distantly felt he should. Much like he would ten years later in a stranger’s room, he’d just let himself be kissed. Julien’s lips were soft and stained a pale shade of purple.

After they’d been carted away to their respective homes, Stanhope had thrown a tantrum. A sober one, so much more terrifying because of it. By the time Stanhope was done with him, Nix was in such a state that he would’ve done anything, anything in the world to make his father stop hating him. He’d tried lying already and it hadn’t worked. So he told the truth—all of it.

Part of Nix had been relieved to hear his father say that he would never, ever meet that boy again.

“I was normal,” he said now, curled up on the berth with his face pressed on Dick’s lap. “Before you came along.”

Dick was silent for a moment at that, and when he spoke he sounded a little out of breath.

“I’m sorry, Lew,” he murmured.

They endured in silence the next slamming of the ship, which was not as bad the third time around, though Nix heard Dick hiss when the back of his head bumped against the wall. After one last round of waltz, it all went quiet.

Had Nix been any more sober, he would have probably left, staggered down to his bunk in the crew’s quarters and slept the night away, or not.

As it was, he pretended to be asleep until he wasn’t pretending anymore. 


	2. Chapter 2

** _16 July 1944, London (I)_ **

  


It had been Dick’s idea and Nix, hesitant as he was, still held himself up as a decent enough human being that he could not refuse. Which did not mean that he hadn’t—albeit briefly—considered wriggling out of it with an excuse or another. But Dick’s honest gaze had seen through all the layers and uncovered the core of discomfort that lay at the center of his reluctance, making quick work of it with one of those factual remarks that again and again grounded Nix to his duties. 

“He ships back tomorrow, Nix.” 

Nix had nodded and said that sure, he would come. He could use a change of scenery, at any rate. 

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in a real hospital. His grandfather had died in one, but Nix had been off to Yale at the time, and by the time he’d felt like making it back, the funeral arrangements had been made and the body composed in the coffin in a sea of flowers. He hadn’t been there either when Kathy had given birth, though Blanche had told him on the phone that it had been the swiftest thing, into the room and off to baby wash in just under three hours. _He’s a true Nixon, Lew_, she’d said, speaking excitedly in the mouthpiece. _No dilly-dallying._

Now they were nowhere close to the obstetrics ward, but as he and Dick walked down the corridor, two sets of synchronised steps bouncing off the ancient walls with a booming echo, Nix thought of his Michael coming out into the world and felt a painful tug in his chest. For surely there must be a better place for a baby to start his life than where other people came to mend their broken bodies and die. 

The most shocking part of it all was seeing Wally out of his uniform, because the rest—the ugly burn scars peeking out of his collar, the bandaged stump of his left hand—was nothing that France hadn’t already made a familiar sight, and what a crash course that had been. The injuries didn’t impress him, but the civilian shirt and the home pants made Wally look diminished, like there wasn’t much left of the Toccoa man, the rest of him having been shucked off into the laundry bin with his Army clothes. 

“Look what the cat dragged in,” Wally said when they appeared at the door. He put his book face down on the bed and climbed off, bracing himself on his good hand, the movement nimble enough to trick the eye with an illusion of effortlessness. 

“Hey,” Dick said simply, walking into the room with Nix trailing behind like a contrary child. Dick had brought flowers, which was customary, but when he presented the bouquet to Wally Nix looked away, struck by the added layer of history between the two that made the scene look mildly ridiculous. 

Wally smiled and reached for Dick’s arm, pulling him into a lopsided hug. His eyes met Nix’s over Dick’s shoulder, and he nodded with a fraction of the smile still in place before pulling back and accepting the flowers. 

“No edelweiss? Thought you lot’d be hiking in the Alps by now,” Wally grinned. 

“Give us another few months,” Dick promised. “They say Berlin by Christmas.” 

“I like the sound of that. Hey, Nix, how’s it going.” 

Nix took a step forward, extending his right hand reflexively, and Wally—whose one hand was occupied—had to tuck the bouquet into the fold of his left elbow before he could match it. On Nix’s side Dick made a little aborted gesture, like he’d meant to help but he’d thought better of it. 

“Hey,” Nix said, shaking Wally’s hand with a measure of warmth. “You sure look good for a man who was almost blown up to confetti.” 

“What, this?” Wally grinned, waving his bandaged wrist. “It’s nothing. Sobel would’ve made me run another lap before he called the medics.” 

“He would have, wouldn’t he. The bastard.” 

Wally gestured at the single empty chair at his bedside. There was another free chair by the second bed, which was occupied by a man completely wrapped in bandages like a mummy, still fast asleep despite the ruckus. Nix picked up the chair as quietly as he could, depositing it with minimal noise next to Dick’s. 

“Factory accident,” Wally explained, lowering his voice, even though Nix had a feeling that the guy would not wake up no matter how loud the room was. “They keep him sedated most of the time.” 

“Oh yeah?” 

“Yeah.” Wally made a face. “I’ve seen him awake. It’s not pretty.” 

Nix wondered if the victims of the Nixon Nitration Works disaster had looked like that. He couldn’t remember. In 1924, a few days before the sentence that would force them to pay a crazy compensation to the widow of one of their workers, Lewis Nixon Sr. had had the idea of taking the family out on a publicity stunt. They’d gone from ward to ward, room to room, house to house, the whole royal family from the President down to baby Blanche, having pictures taken for the press as they offered condolences and gave out minimal reimbursements that could never cover the amount of suffering they had caused. For years Lew had believed it a genuine act of goodwill, until his father had explained with a voice full of drink and spite that it had been their lawyers’ idea. After a little money changed pockets the poor bastards would have a hard time dragging the Nixons to court like the bitch had. 

“He should sue,” Nix said pensively, and Wally nodded. 

“If he makes it,” he said. 

“Sit down,” Dick called in his softer CO voice, wrapping his fingers around Wally’s elbow and gently steering him towards the bed. “How’s the packing coming along?” 

“All but done. Not a lot of stuff to bring back.” 

“You going straight home?” 

“Yeah. New York first, but I’m not staying. Just the one night. I’m not much into sightseeing these days, if you can believe it.” 

“A couple of clubs are half decent,” Nix interjected. “I can give you some pointers, if you like.” 

“Yeah, maybe,” Wally said vaguely, and then looked Nix straight in the eye and added with a hint of humor: “I’m not sure that we’ve got the same tastes, Nix.” 

Wally’s frankness gave him pause. Surely at this stage there was no point in pretending that Nix didn’t know, but the joke betrayed a familiarity that Nix didn’t think either of them had ever earned, or even asked for. 

He threw a quick glance at Dick, who looked right back at him with a watchful expression. 

“Long as you like a stiff drink, I’m sure I’ll have something for you,” he promised, and Wally’s mouth broke into a smile. 

They talked about New York for a while, and about home for longer still. The California race tracks were still closed, but after Normandy, the end of the war felt closer at hand than it had for the past three years. 

“I’m gonna get back on the saddle, that’s for sure,” Wally declared. “I’m just rusty as hell.” 

“Isn’t it a little like bike riding?” Dick asked. 

“Sort of. Except the bike bites, bucks, and more often than not hates you.” 

“Sounds charming,” Nix scoffed. “I thought you only bred race champions or something like that?” 

“We do,” Wally replied, looking surprised that Nix remembered. “But you know primadonnas,” he smirked. “They have tempers.” 

“Don’t I know,” Nix acknowledged, throwing Dick a sideways glance that earned him an eye roll in response. 

At that point a group of mixed male voices came from the corridor, and both Wally and Dick looked at the open door at the same time as if they were expecting someone. The three men—Infantry, 1st Armored—threw just the most casual glance inside the room and carried on without stopping. 

Wally ran his fingers through his hair, letting out a sigh. 

“Is he coming?” Dick asked. 

“I don’t know.” 

Something in the clear cut, almost brusque answer sounded a little off, and Nix’s impression was reinforced when Dick leaned back in his chair and looked puzzled. 

“I guess you’ve heard from him more than I have,” Wally added. 

“We met on the other side a few times,” Dick admitted, “but we didn’t talk much. There wasn’t a lot of time.” 

“I know. No time to write a letter to a buddy either.” 

Dick looked uncomfortable. “It’s been busy times, Wally. For real.” 

“And you think I don’t know? There isn’t a fucking day that I’m not—” 

Wally caught himself halfway through the sentence and pressed his knuckles to his lips, as if to stop the rest of it from coming out. 

“Sorry,” he said more calmly. “I get it, okay? I’m not—” Wally made a gesture that seemed to mean he was fully aware of everything he wasn’t. “—delusional,” he finished. 

Part of Nix truly felt for him, empathy stirring at the vulnerability in Wally’s voice, though the knowledge that it was a man Wally was talking about grated uncomfortably at the back of his mind. 

“I don’t think it’s like that,” Dick supplied, but Wally shook his head. 

It hit Nix then, somewhat late, that it was one thing for Nix to know in general terms, and another thing entirely to discuss a delicate and private matter in front of him. The conversation was stunted, Dick and Wally hovering around the topic and mincing words in the oblique way adults spoke when they didn’t want the children in the room to understand. 

“So, don’t take it personal, but I need a coffee,” Nix announced abruptly, pushing his chair back. “The café downstairs any good?” 

“Worse than Mackall, better than Toccoa,” Wally gave his assessment, accompanied by an apologetic shrug. 

“High praise, eh? Oh well. I’ll be back.” 

He’d be lying to himself if he said that the air wasn’t much lighter outside the room. Nix threw one last look inside, quick enough to catch Dick leaning towards the bed, his lips moving but his voice too low for the words to carry over to the corridor. Wally looked deflated, his cheeks hollow, like a much older version of himself. He was gripping his left forearm with his right hand, holding the bandaged stump in his lap. 

Nix walked away. 

  
  
  


** _23 March 1944, Ramsbury_ **

  


He and Wally had met exactly one time after Moore left Easy in September. 

In March 1944, the 101st had organized the biggest dress rehearsal of a jump that the Allied Forces had ever seen, with two full battalions parachuting over Ramsbury and the third standing for inspection in fighting trim in front of the top brass. 

All troopers, officers and enlisted men, had landed safely in front of the President and Mr. Churchill like an orderly school of jellyfish; they had then dropped onto their feet, tumbled, stood up, collected their chutes and weapons and run to the assembly area in perfect harmony. Ike had been duly impressed. 

Nix hadn’t thought of Wally Moore in so long that the idea of him popping up like a tenacious weed was the furthest from his mind. So it was quite a surprise when he entered the local pub and recognized the guy’s broad shoulders and light brown hair before even spotting the patch with the winged torch on his arm. 

Wally was standing at the counter, a pint of beer in front of him, still frothy and full to the brim. 

Nix considered going somewhere else, but Harry recognized him almost at the same time and walked straight up to him with a cheerful exclamation. 

“Hey, Welsh,” Wally smiled. He half turned on his feet, sticking out a hand. “How’re you doing?” 

“Same old, same old,” Harry answered, shaking Wally’s hand. “Are you on your own?” 

“Yes, for now,” he said. “You?” 

“Fresh from the jump. We’ve come to wash the dust out of our mouths.” 

“Same. It was good, wasn’t it?” 

“Great. One chute failed, but no trooper attached, thank God. Just a crate of supplies.” He was excited, Harry was, speaking fast and too much. The top brass had hammered the importance of this jump into their heads for so long that even Nix, who wasn’t prone to excitement, had had to admit to an extra pounding in his chest when he’d stood at the plane door. 

“Did you see him? Up close?” Wally asked, lowering his voice as if the President could enter the pub that very second and overhear their conversation. 

“Ike? Not up close, no. We walked past the stage, but Mr. Churchill kinda occupied it all.” 

Harry pointed at the last empty booth; the pub was filling up quickly with men and officers of 2nd and 3rd Battalion who’d been granted a couple of hours off before being trucked back to Aldbourne. 

“Why don’t you sit with us? Buck said he’d join us later—you know Buck Compton?—but who knows with the guy, really.” 

“And how are you, Nix?” Wally asked when they were seated, eyes rising slowly from his beer. Harry had stayed behind to grab drinks. 

Nix leaned back against the backrest with a shrug. “Can’t complain. How’s Lincolnshire?” 

“Cold. Wet. Can’t remember the last time I woke up and saw the sun out of my window.” 

“Checks out.” 

Wally smiled. “England, am I right?” 

“Could be worse.” 

“Yeah. For a while I really had hopes for the Pacific.” 

Harry came back from the bar with a pint of lager for himself and a whiskey neat for Nix. “Cheers.” 

“Cheers. I heard about Black Swan getting the boot,” Wally said, licking the beer foam off his lips. “I’ve been meaning to ask for ages. How did you pull that off?” He looked at Nix for one second too long, like he thought that Nix had something to do with it. 

“Who?” Harry asked. 

“Sobel. Old nickname,” Nix said. 

“From Toccoa,” Wally added. 

“Right,” Harry said, with a minimal eye roll. “You should ask Dick. He was involved.” 

“Really?” 

“But it was Nix here who convinced Strayer to drop the court-martial.” 

“Court-martial? Jesus,” Wally said under his breath. “I thought that part was a joke.” 

“I laughed all right,” Nix smirked. 

“Nix,” Harry declared, raising his pint in a mock toast, “if you weren’t such a good friend, I’d say you’re a real shitty one.” 

“Amen to that.” 

They all took a long sip from their glasses. Wally looked around, eyes wandering through the room as if in search of something. “Where is he, by the way? Dick.” 

“Are you looking for Dick Winters in a bar?” Nix snorted. 

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Wally replied, with a smile that was entirely friendly and yet begged for a punch. 

“He’s at the base,” Harry said, “sorting out the crate misdrop.” 

“One of yours?” 

“Yeah. A minor glitch, but Sink wants all the dust under the carpet by the end of the day. Some report or something.” 

“Paperwork? He’ll be delighted,” Wally said. 

“Oh, he was,” Harry grinned. 

They sat there for a while, chatting of the old times as if the old times hadn’t been a mere few months past, Harry catching up on even older stories from Toccoa. When Buck Compton joined them with Luz and Guarnere and Toye tagging along, somewhere around the bottom of the second pint, Wally took it as his cue to leave. It was almost sundown, and he wanted to drop at camp before dinner time and say hi to a few people, he said. 

Nix had more than a rough idea of which people Wally might be referring to, and months ago he wouldn’t have felt threatened, but the guy hadn’t been around for a long time and now he was back, and something about an unsupervised reunion grated on Nix’s nerves. 

“I’m going too,” Nix said. “I’ll walk you.” 

Wally regarded him with curiosity, like he hadn’t expected the offer. “Sure.” 

They walked in silence out of the crowded bar and onto the crowded road and into progressively quieter and quieter streets. Nix lit himself a cigarette; Wally declined. Nix couldn’t think of anything he especially wanted to say, but after a minute the heavy silence started to disturb him. Then just when he’d started to think that this hadn’t been such a great idea, Wally opened his mouth again. 

“They say it’ll be soon,” he said in a quiet, pensive voice. “The jump.” 

“Yeah.” 

“What are you going to do after the war’s over?” Wally suddenly asked. 

Nix took a puff from his cigarette and answered before even considering the question. “Go home. What else?” 

Another silence, a little shorter this time. 

“Alone?” Wally prodded. 

_ Ah. _ “I don’t see how that’s any of your business.” 

Wally didn’t reply to that; didn’t apologize either. He kept walking, looking forward, and at some point he said in an even lower voice, as if keeping it low was a necessity at this point: “If we’re both alive by the end of this, I’ll try to drag him home with me.” 

For a second Nix thought that Wally meant Dick, and a violent protest rose to his lips. He barely managed to restrain himself—Dick following the likes of Wally Moore home, _ like a lost puppy, for fuck’s sake _ —but then he realized that Wally meant someone else entirely. 

“Your friend?” 

“Mm-mm.” 

“Why are you telling me?” 

Wally frowned and seemed surprised, not by the question, but by the answer he gave next, as if he hadn’t really considered his own motivations before opening his mouth. “Dunno. I wanted to tell someone. I figured it doesn’t matter if you know.” 

“Well, you should be more careful,” Nix replied, feeling embarrassed to be the recipient of such an enormous confidence, no matter how much of an inkling he might have had already. 

“Why? You gonna turn me in?” Wally asked, regarding him with a calm and fearless expression. 

“What? No,” Nix frowned, taken aback. 

“Thought so.” 

They kept walking. Nix was no Puritan, God knew, but he couldn’t see it. Two guys living together stateside, pretending to be—what? Mates? Army buddies who’d stuck together to defray expenses? How long could that last before the neighbors started to talk, how long before someone came knocking at their door? 

Nix’s cigarette tasted funny now, like something had subtly changed. He chewed the inside of his lower lip, mulling the question over and over in his mind until he had to ask. 

“And then what?” he said. 

“What what?” 

“You go home with a friend. Then what?” 

“Ah.” Wally shrugged lightly. “Home for a while. Not for long. Then I’m thinking San Francisco, or maybe L.A. I don’t know.” He smiled to himself, pushing his hands a little deeper in his trousers pockets. “Haven’t asked him yet.” 

Nix took a pull from his cigarette, a deep one. It still didn’t make much sense, but the part about putting half a state between you and your family, yeah, he could see that. Hell, go for a whole continent while you’re at it. 

“You going to?” Nix asked finally, when they were almost at the gates of the base. 

Wally nodded. “After the jump.” 

Nix had heard that one before. They all had things set aside to do after the jump, people to see, places to go. Life had started slowing down when the ship had docked in Liverpool and by now it had almost come to a full stop, as if they were collectively holding their breath. _ After the jump I’ll tell her... After the jump I’ll buy myself… After the jump I will... _

Nix for his part had his eyes set on London; with a bit of luck, he would manage a full weekend under his belt before Dick got restless and started pining to get back to work like he had the last days in Scotland. 

“Look,” Wally said, stopping on his feet, “can I say something?” 

Nix nodded warily, flicking his cigarette off to the ground. 

“Guys like you and me, we’re fine making it up as we go. Not knowing for sure. But he ain’t like you and me.” 

Nix sighed at that, massaging his eyes with thumb and index finger. He should’ve been more irritated, normally would have been, but something about Wally’s gentle tone and light frown told Nix that he honestly cared, and Nix couldn’t fault anyone for caring about Dick Winters. 

“A few rolls in the hay and now you’re an expert, Moore?” he snorted. 

Wally pressed his lips together, as if he’d hoped for a different reaction, but then he let them curl up in a smile. “Yeah. Unsolicited advice is kind of my department.” 

“Still none of your fucking business, though,” Nix reminded him, but in a light-hearted, almost friendly voice, which frankly was the best he could offer. 

“All right, all right.” 

As if summoned, Dick appeared down the main road that ran through the base. He was walking towards the gates at an unhurried pace, straight up to the spot where Nix and Wally were standing, no doubt headed home after a long day. 

Dick assessed the pair of them with a slightly puzzled expression, then let out a careful smile, and Nix felt a gentle tug of expectation in his chest. They’d make it to London soon enough, but maybe earlier than that—maybe even tonight—they’d manage to snatch a private moment. It didn’t have to be a whole thing. Nix didn’t know if he should be proud or ashamed of how little it took to make him come undone these days. 

He looked away, whatever insecurity had prompted him to follow Wally completely forgotten, buried under a newfound stock of confidence. 

_ But he ain’t like you and me. _

Nix smirked internally. So what if Wally Moore had fucked his way through the whole Airborne. He didn’t know the first thing about the two of them. 

  
  
  


** _16 July 1944, London (II)_ **

  


Nix thanked the waitress and inhaled the smell of his coffee, which was probably nothing to write home about but looked three times as thick as the watery swill they had drunk in France. 

He brought the mug to his mouth and checked the waitress out as she walked back to the counter. She had a nice figure, petite and well-shaped. She looked like her thighs would be soft and creamy under her skirt, and Nix bet that they’d feel very nice wrapped around his hips, but he wasn’t in a mood to follow the fantasy further, nor to do something about it. He took a hot sip of coffee and browsed through his newspaper, taking in the headlines with a quick glance. 

The Russians were marching deeper into Poland. FDR was going to run for the fourth term. The new Cary Grant movie was due to come out in September. Nix read a few lines here and there, but soon got tired and folded the newspaper away. 

The café was full of hospital staff and visitors alike, smoothly rotating in and out of the room in a convective motion. Nix idly considered the layout of the place, the furniture, counting the escape routes (one by the bar, one on the other side), assessing the coverage provided by the counter (full, sturdy oak), guessing how long it would take to effectively barricade the doors (two-three minutes, if four men worked together). If they couldn’t safely leave the place they’d have to herd the women and kids to the back room; those who couldn’t fit would have to hide behind the counter. Though none of that would be worth a damn if the enemy had brought a machine gun, ’cause the bullets would just pierce through all the layers like hot knives through butter. Only chance then would be to lie down and keep quiet like church mice and hope that the Krauts didn’t know about the American paratrooper and the two—no, three British RAF officers hiding in there amidst a bunch of civilians. 

“Hey, Nix,” Dick said touching Nix’s shoulder, and Nix shook up, startled. “You see a ghost?” 

“Not yet,” Nix answered quickly. “Is it time to go up?” he asked, checking his watch. He’d been sitting there for a little over fifteen minutes, certainly not long enough to be called rude. 

“No, don’t worry,” Dick said, pulling back the chair on Nix’s left side. “Don showed up. I thought I’d follow your example.” 

“Give two fellas a little privacy, you mean.” 

“Yeah. Thanks for that, by the way.” 

“Sure. Call it a sixth sense, but I can always tell when I’m a third wheel.” 

“You weren’t. Not like that,” Dick started to object, but Nix ignored him. 

“You want a coffee?” he asked instead. At Dick’s affirmative nod, Nix flagged down the waitress from across the room, mutely pointing at his cup and asking for another one. “London’s finest. Better than in France.” 

“Is that the benchmark? France?” 

“France is always the benchmark, Dick.” 

“Can’t argue with you there,” Dick declared, lips curling up into a half-smile. “The landscapes were particularly fine. The accommodations? Top-notch. And the hospitality—” 

“Stop the press,” Nix interrupted him. “Dick Winters grew a sense of humor. Was it the extra forty bucks in your paycheck that did it, Captain?” 

“I’ve always had one,” Dick replied, with that twinkle in his eye that occasionally suggested the existence of a deep-seated cache of mischievousness. 

“Sure you have.” Nix fished an immaculate cigarette pack from his front pocket and lit himself a cigarette, taking a first drag. 

The sound of the air-raid siren cut through the chattering and the soft crockery noises. It was a long metallic howl, and even though Nix had never heard it sounded for real he knew exactly how to react. He and Dick got on their feet at the same time, chairs screeching loudly on the floor. 

Dick’s eyes shot up to the hospital building, to the tall grey windows behind which they had been sitting just a handful of minutes before, but Nix squeezed his elbow firmly through the jacket. 

“They know what to do.” 

Dick nodded and followed him outside. 

They joined the orderly, almost bored river of London citizens already on their way down the stairs of Whitechapel station. High above their heads they could hear a V1 approaching, buzzing loud like an angry bumblebee. Just as Nix set foot on the floor of the underpassage the buzzing went suddenly quiet, and the mass behind him panicked and started to shove. He stumbled, pushed forward by a man twice his size, and muttered a curse as his cigarette fell on the wet pavement. 

Downstairs, the uninterrupted howling of the sirens repeated by the PA system of the station was not as loud. The wait was mildly exciting at first, standing under the vaulted roof without a clue of the extent of the destruction that was happening upstairs, but soon it got long and boring. He and Dick had left the few available seats for the ladies and the elderly and carved a little corner for themselves at the end of the passenger platform. Nix had soon lit another cigarette to replace the lost one. 

In the well-lit station Dick looked a little pale, like he was on the verge of catching the flu. With no seats left he’d crouched down on his heels, back against the wall, and was looking forward into the distance with an empty expression on his face. 

“Hey,” Nix said after a while, gently tapping the side of Dick’s head with his knuckles. “Cheer up, Captain.” 

“Enough with the ’Captain’.” 

“Not until you get that oak leaf, I don’t think,” Nix grinned. 

“Yeah, sure,” Dick said distractedly, not looking up. 

Nix took a pull from his cigarette. “What is it?” 

“Mm?” 

“Out with it, c’mon.” 

Dick sighed but didn’t answer right away. He had his arms crossed on his chest; the fingers of his right hand started tapping nervously on the opposite elbow. 

“It’s nothing.” 

“Wrong answer. Try again?” 

Dick shook his head. “It’s just—this.” He threw a look at the other end of the platform. “Machine gun fire I can manage as well as the next man. This—” He frowned, like he found his own reaction puzzling, not up to what he’d normally expect of himself. Nix knew that face; he’d seen it a few times before. “I’d rather be out there and see it coming.” 

“Well, you wouldn’t,” Nix said airily. “No time.” 

“You know what I mean.” 

Nix nodded, ’cause sure he did. Nobody liked a rat’s death, and when push came to shove, better out there under God’s sun than down in a tunnel that smelled of sewage and gasoline. 

“I know,” he said. “It ain’t exactly a party down here.” 

Dick sighed again and didn’t say anything. In the background the eerie howling of the sirens continued, pitch rising and falling at regular intervals. It was a sound you might hear in your nightmares, the lament of a monstrous creature. 

Nix crouched down on his heels next to Dick, bumping his shoulder lightly against his. Dick’s neck was craned forward in a tense line, his jaw set tight as he gritted his teeth silently behind his pursed lips. 

Nix handed him the half-smoked cigarette, and when Dick didn’t take it, he waved it closer to the other man’s fingers. “Come on. It’s good for the nerves.” 

“I don’t—” 

“Listen to a friend.” He looked Dick straight in the eye and smiled warmly, until Dick gave up and took the cigarette gingerly between his thumb and index finger. “You suck the smoke in—” 

“I’ve smoked before,” Dick cut him short, bringing the filter to his mouth. He took a tentative drag, inhaling through it with an unhappy face, like a boy forced to swallow a spoonful of broccoli. He let the smoke out and licked the unfamiliar taste off his lips. “Thank you,” he said, handing back the cigarette. 

“Welcome,” Nix muttered around his next puff. 

Dick hesitated when Nix handed it back, like he hadn’t expected to have to go through the whole thing, but he took it without complaining, and for a while they just shared it in silence, the tiny lit stick moving back and forth between them. 

Nix didn’t think that a cigarette could do much for one who was not set in the vice, but he knew that slow, easy gestures were what you needed for the nerves. He was pretty pleased with himself when Dick’s shoulders and neck relaxed slightly and a little extra blood, courtesy of the nicotine, flowed to his face. 

When Dick tried to hand the cigarette over a minute later, Nix shook his head. “Kill it,” he said, guessing there were maybe one or two drags left, and followed Dick with the corner of his eye as he obediently soldiered on. 

The lights on the platform went off. The crowd let out a soft gasp. In the dark, the screeching of the air-raid sirens suddenly sounded outrageously loud, like an endless, intolerable scream. Nix felt Dick’s shoulder brush against his as Dick stood up, the lit cigarette a tiny orange dot that faintly illuminated Dick’s stomach. Nix followed him. He grabbed Dick’s arm reflexively, for balance, and the cigarette butt fell and rolled over Nix’s shoe onto the floor of the platform. Dick’s arm tensed under the pressure, pumping up as if ready to strike. 

At that moment a detonation vibrated faintly through the walls and the floor of the station, followed by an array of other, more distant ones. Dick’s hand shot up to Nix’s wrist, holding it tight through the sleeve and the shirt cuff. 

“It’ll come back in a second,” Nix said calmly, meaning the light, and took a step forward in the pitch dark. The tip of his shoe touched the instep of Dick’s foot; his knee bumped lightly against Dick’s leg. Drawn forward by Dick’s grip, Nix pressed on until his right leg was flush with Dick’s left from foot to thigh, and Dick’s arm and their joined hands were trapped tightly between their chests. 

Close to Nix’s face, Dick took a sharp breath and held it. Dick’s thumb pressed on the inside of Nix’s wrist, on his pulse, which immediately started beating stronger and faster. 

Dick exhaled, his breath smelling of tobacco, and for a moment that was all Nix could feel: the dark, burnt smell invading his nostrils, not bad but unfamiliar, mixed as it was with the scent of Dick’s aftershave. Nix had never found cigarette breath sensual but damn, he knew he would from now on, like the smell had touched a switch in his brain that was just waiting to be flipped. He pressed forward, putting his free hand on Dick’s shoulder and pawing his way upwards until it cupped the back of Dick’s neck. 

Dick let out a shallow breath through his nose. His mouth followed, landing blindly in a soft crash on the corner of Nix’s mouth. It took a second to adjust, both heads tilting at the same time until their lips were aligned in a familiar angle. Nix hummed a soft encouragement and pressed a kiss on the other’s mouth. 

God, he’d missed that. His body sang with pleasure when Dick disentangled his hands and brought them up to the sides of Nix’s face. Nix barely noticed it when the movement knocked off his cap. Dick opened his mouth and drew him in and Nix followed, their joined bodies tilting like young plants in a strong wind. 

Dick’s mouth tasted like ash and Nix discovered that he liked that too. _Please_, he found himself thinking over and over, something the little pride he had left wouldn’t allow him to say aloud. _Please, please, just—_

The light on the wall above their heads gave a sickly flutter, going on and off a few times. Before it was on for real, Dick had already pushed Nix away—not violently, but strongly enough to catch him by surprise. Nix looked at Dick’s face under the restored light, blinking to clear his vision. Dick’s cheeks were flushed, his lips parted, puffed up and wet. 

The howling of the siren morphed into a continuous sound, loud at first, then progressively lower, until it died in a fuzzy white noise that left Nix’s ears ringing. 

Dick looked back at Nix, then away, and what Nix was going to say dried up on his tongue. 

Surely, this was too big a punishment for his sins. 

“Your cap’s on the floor,” Dick said in a flat voice in which Nix could hear, light as day, a minimal trembling. 

The crowd was already moving towards the exit, leaving them behind. Nix collected his cap and followed the people upstairs, and he didn’t look back until he was out of the station, in the bright morning light that shone over the unbroken, unfazed city of London. 

  
  
  


** _10 September 1944, Aldbourne_ **

  


There were only two exceptions to the ‘no hunting’ sign that the good people of Aldbourne had put up against the US Army boys. 

They would tolerate, possibly even welcome, a serious-minded fellow with honorable intentions who was willing to put up with a long courting ritual under the vigilant eyes of the family. That was the case for one Easy sergeant, who in a little under nine months had found himself turned into a model churchgoer, engaged and married off to a local girl. 

The other exception was widows. 

Nix rolled over onto his stomach and shook his cigarette into the ashtray, looking idly at the expanse of naked skin next to him. 

It was not terribly late—twelve-hundred, perhaps closer to twelve-twenty—though embarrassingly late for an Army officer to find himself still in bed. He had not been up for long either, on account of it being a Sunday and because his host had been so gracious to let him sleep in. She had also been responsible for rousing him up. 

Now, sated and with his hair ruffled, Nix was smoking the first cigarette of the day while his friend lazily puffed at her own. She was naked and utterly comfortable in her own skin, which Nix found refreshing after all the British girls who scrambled for their nighties as soon as the thing was over. She was fair-haired and pale and just this side of plump, with a soft, round backside Nix was especially fond of. In bed she was a solid, enthusiastic partner, with somewhat limited imagination but more athletic skills than you would credit her small frame for. 

Nix reached out to Irene’s naked back. She smiled, looking surprised, and rested her cheek on her folded arm. Nix’s touch was light and simple, not even sensual, but Nix knew for a fact that before he’d come along, she hadn’t been touched for a long time. 

Nix’s hand moved further down to the small of her back, appraising her body rather than making an advance, like a farmer considering the purchase of a quality specimen—though the comparison was callous and ungenerous and Nix was immediately ashamed of it. 

“Will you stay for lunch?” 

“Depends. Are you cooking?” 

“Mm.” She frowned, probably recalling the contents of her pantry, which Nix suspected not particularly well-stocked as a rule, though rather out of negligence than poor means. “More like warming up leftovers.” 

“Quite the Sunday feast, uh?” 

She grinned. “Beggars can’t be choosers, Lewis.” 

Nix’s hand was still resting on Irene’s buttcheek, large and calloused and warm. When he talked he moved it upwards, all the way to her nape in a long caressing motion. 

“All right, then. If you insist.” 

“I don’t,” she smiled, stretching her nape back against Nix’s fingers as he threaded them through her hair. She had beautiful caramel hair, wavy and dense like a quilt. When she went down on him, it spread all around her face and over Nix’s thighs in a very charming way. 

“Let me see what I can find,” she said, killing her cigarette in the ashtray and freeing her hair from Nix’s grip with a rebellious headshake. She swiftly stepped into her home dress and slippers, leaving her underwear on display on the chair. Before leaving the room she threw Nix a glance over her shoulder to see if he had noticed (he had). 

Nix finished smoking unhurriedly and remained in bed, listening to the noises coming from downstairs. It was a small house: from the bedroom he could hear Irene open and close cabinet doors, moving stuff around and humming a tune as she worked. When the doorbell rang, she stopped what she was doing and went to check the door, but didn’t answer right away. Nix heard her padded steps climb up the stairs. 

“You’re not staying,” Irene announced, showing her face through the bedroom door. “They sent a lad to pick you up.” 

Nix made a contrary face. He was almost okay with being recalled on duty on a leave day, but he wasn’t too happy with the Army tracing him to his mistress’s house. 

The runner dropped him at regiment headquarters, to a closed-door meeting with the COs and XOs of the three battalions and the respective S-2’s and S-3’s. Lieutenant Colonel Strayer—because of course it would be Strayer—welcomed him with an actual wink that said, “Nixon, you dog.” 

He left the briefing with a mild sense of annoyance, and it took him the whole drive back to Aldbourne to figure out that it had nothing to do with his spoiled Sunday. 

The truth was, while complaining for most of the summer that he was bored rotten out in the countryside, he’d started to make himself comfortable. Irene was nice, good company. She liked keeping things simple and straightforward. Sometimes Nix stayed the night and sometimes he didn’t, but she never pressured him either way, nor did she feel compelled to be available all the time. When he did stay, she accepted him the way one accepts the regular visits of a stray cat: she’d feed him, tend to him, possibly care a little, but ultimately not expect him to become a pet. After being away from home for so long, Nix had found himself welcoming a return to a domestic routine, and now he’d have to give it up again. 

And there was something else too, a nagging feeling at the back of his mind, like an internal itch that he wasn’t quite able to locate. 

He went to look for Dick afterwards. The briefing had taken the better part of the day, including Nix’s lunch time, but on the upside it had also ruined his appetite. 

He found him with the rest of Easy Company at the local pub, a rare sight probably owing more to a desire to honor Lipton’s promotion than to a newly discovered passion for beer and British food. 

Somehow, Dick seemed to know something was up even before Nix said hi. Probably the way Nix purposefully stepped into the pub instead of casually shuffling his feet, the way his eyes aimed and sought Dick out of the sea of OD’s. 

“News from regiment,” Nix said, stepping close to him to be able to keep his voice low. “We’re moving out.” 

Dick nodded, unsurprised. “When?” 

“Tomorrow. Tell the boys to start packing.” 

It was unnecessary, of course, him coming personally. A runner would soon reach Dick and the other company COs with the orders, but they had an unspoken deal about this kind of things: anything Nix could share—and a good deal he could not—he would. Which was the reason why later in the evening, after Nix had had a spot of dinner and he and Harry were mostly done with their beers, Dick came up and proposed that the three of them have a chat. 

There was a level of clarity to an operation that could only be achieved by outlying it for someone else. Being on the receiving end of a briefing was nice and well, but a good-looking map and a decent briefer could go a long way in hiding the glitches in a plan, especially the fine grit in the gears of an apparently well-oiled machine. As he laid it out for Dick and Harry, the vague itch Nix had felt when stepping out of regiment headquarters turned into a full-on tingling, a creeping suspicion that major things were being overlooked. 

Harry put his finger on it first. “It looks damn easy, doesn’t it,” he said. 

“It does,” Nix admitted. “Someone said that’s the beauty of it.” 

“How good’s the intel?” Dick asked. 

“British,” Nix answered grimly. 

Three pairs of eyes scanned the operations map spread on the table. The distribution of the Allied troops in Holland drew a long, optimistic line all the way from the Belgian outposts to a small town tantalizingly close to the German border. It did look too good to be true: take this one poorly defended town and wait for the tanks. Don’t worry about the Krauts; it’s just reserve troops and replacements. 

“The intel doesn’t worry me as much as this,” Nix said, placing his hand on the lower part of the map. “Our DZ’s here, and our first objective—” His index finger slid on the paper as he spoke, stopping on the bridge over the Wilhelmina Canal. He tapped the spot. “Seven miles away. In plain daylight.” 

“It’s gonna be a hell of a rush,” Dick muttered. “No chance for a night drop?” 

Nix shook his head. “It’ll be a new moon. Not enough light.” 

“And if we miss the objective?” 

“If we miss,” Nix made a little defeated gesture, “the Krauts will probably blow up the bridge, and the British Guards will have to build a new one to let the tanks across.” 

Dick dropped his chin on his chest. “A Bailey? That’ll take a day at least.” 

“At least.” 

“Which brings us back to how good the intel really is,” Harry said. “’Cause if the Brits fucked that up—” 

“Yeah. I know.” 

In the long silence that followed, Nix wondered if there was any way he could scrounge any more information than what he’d been handed officially. Short of phoning up Maxwell Taylor for a private chat, nothing came to mind. 

Finally Harry heaved a sigh and stepped away from the table. “I guess I’m gonna write a letter home. Thanks for the heads-up, Nix.” 

“Sure. Good night.” 

Once they were alone, Dick sat down heavily on his chair and put his elbows on the table, eyes still peeled on the map. “I don’t like it,” he murmured. “We rehearsed Normandy for months, and for this one we get, what? One week notice?” 

“Berlin by Christmas,” Nix reminded him. “Montgomery needs a notch in his belt before the war’s over.” 

“By risking my men’s skin?” Dick snapped. 

Nix clucked his tongue. “I didn’t make the plan, you know,” he said lightly, and Dick immediately looked chastised. 

“I know. I’m sorry.” 

Nix reached out to touch Dick’s shoulder. “We’ll manage. We always do.” 

Dick nodded. 

“Go pack. Don’t you have letters to write to Mrs. Winters?” 

“Maybe,” Dick said tiredly. He frowned up, as if trying to recall something. “I haven’t written in a while.” 

“You haven’t? Why not?” 

“I’ve been preoccupied.” 

Nix crushed and swallowed down the question that had instinctively risen to his tongue. He folded his scribbled map and tucked it in the inner pocket of his jacket. 

“I’ll get going now,” Dick said. 

“Wait up, I’ll walk with you.” 

Dick carefully looked away. “You going to say goodbye to your friend?” 

Nix wondered who’d told him about Irene. He’d never bothered keeping it a secret, but he hadn’t exactly broadcasted it either. And he sure as hell had never mentioned her to Dick. 

Harry, he thought. It must have been Harry, the blabbermouth. 

“Yeah,” Nix said. “If she’s at home.” 

Whatever Dick thought of a man dropping at a lady’s house at all hours, he kept to himself. 

In the street outside Nix’s billet, Nix patted himself for cigarettes and reflexively offered the pack. Dick pursed his lips. 

“No, thanks.” 

They walked together for a few blocks, stuck in one of those thick silences that got them sometimes, even after years of knowing each other, when small talk seemed impossible and a real conversation was the last thing either of them wanted. 

Dick’s billet was on Nix’s way. Nix waved him good night and walked on, but out of the corner of his eye he saw that Dick had stopped in front of the door, not going in. 

“Nix,” Dick called. 

“Yeah?” 

“Thanks for the chat.” 

“Sure. Any time.” 

“Just so you know,” Dick added, “I don’t take it for granted. That you will do this every time.” 

“You should,” Nix said, though he couldn’t really say why he’d felt like making such a promise, but he had, and now that it was made he would do his best to stand by it. 

Dick smiled warmly, then looked down the road in the direction where Nix was headed, and his smile faltered a little. Nix thought that Dick wanted to say something, and though he had no reason to believe it, he cajoled himself into thinking that Dick was considering asking him to come up to his room—to talk more, or. 

If he did, Nix would say yes. He knew that instantly, sure as he knew his own name. If Dick wanted him—however he might want him these days—Nix would give himself up with his arms high above his head. It should have been scary, finding himself capable of such a complete surrender. Instead it felt tender and bittersweet, because he knew that Dick wouldn’t ask. Granted, he would reach for Nix in a panic, and maybe, with just the right amount of frustration, one day he might succumb to an urge the aftermath of which would be nothing but an exquisite form of torture. But he wouldn’t look Nix straight in the eye like he was doing now and ask him for the simplest thing. 

“Thank you,” Dick said. “I appreciate it.” 

Nix saluted lazily with two fingers and marched on to Irene’s house, to things that were simple and straightforward and ready for the taking, and when she let him in, he was sincerely grateful and stopped thinking of any other way the night might have gone.  



	3. Chapter 3

** _18 September 1944, Eindhoven_ **

It was a well-known fact up at battalion that Strayer didn’t give a damn where his officers spent the night, so long as they were available when needed and mostly doing their job. During operations, Strayer would set up shop somewhere comfortable—he had an eye for a good CP—and once the last report of the day was in, he’d be off to mind his own business and he expected his boys to do the same. Most battalion officers would hang around headquarters anyway, because it was safer and quieter, but Nix got restless when he was far from the line for too long.

Nix got off the jeep and thanked the driver, who saluted before driving back to headquarters. He’d bribed the guy into taking him back to Eindhoven, though he could have easily walked the forty-five minutes distance. Dutch agents had reported sighting German scouts on the road, and he hadn’t wanted to run the risk.

When he entered Dick’s billet, he had to admit to feeling more than a little cranky. He perfunctorily massaged his shoulder and the side of his neck, kneading a compact muscle wall the pain of which he knew wasn’t going to relent for days, and almost immediately gave up the attempt. He stretched his neck the other way and got the resulting wince off his face before knocking on Dick’s door.

Lacking a table, Dick was helping himself to a meager feast of bread and cheese over a scarf spread out on the floor. The improvised picnic put a smile on Nix’s face.

“Smells like France in here.”

“Do I want to know what that means?”

“The cheese. God, what a filthy mind.”

Dick ignored the last comment, chewing slowly and swallowing hard, like he was eating plywood.

“Any good?” Nix asked, sitting cross-legged on the floor across Dick’s dinner. He slipped his musette bag off his shoulder and dropped it by the rusty cot behind his back.

“Thought so when I was hungry,” Dick mumbled around a mouthful, looking skeptically at the piece of cheese sitting in front of him on its paper wrapping.

“Aren’t your folks from around here? You should feel right at home eating cheese that smells like feet.”

Dick nodded. “That’s the problem. It smells and tastes like this homemade cheese my grandmother used to make. And we had to eat it, ’cause you eat what’s on the table.”

Nix smiled, not because Dick’s strict education was especially funny (though part of it was), but rather because he could see it in his mind: a red-haired boy soldiering through a slab of bread and putrid cheese, forcing down bit after bit with a face like a man on death row.

“May I?” he asked, extending a hand, and Dick dutifully relinquished the half-eaten bread. Nix bit over Dick’s tooth marks and chewed pensively, returning the rest. The taste wasn’t entirely unfamiliar, not unlike a very pungent brie, but he wouldn’t necessarily come back for more.

“Okay, it’s not that bad. Beats K-rations.”

“Says the guy who had dinner at battalion headquarters.”

“Well, yeah. It was filet mignon tonight, accompanied by a 1787 Château Lafite. We’d been offered the 1789, but Strayer said no—’89 was a poor year for Cabernet Sauvignon grapes, everybody knows that.”

Dick took a second to process the joke, but when he did, he broke into a most gratifying chuckle—the first Nix had gotten out of him in a long time. It was so pleasing, in fact, that Nix let himself be pulled into a chuckle of his own, and to hide the fact that he was laughing at his own joke he hastily got up with the excuse of cracking open the window.

Letting some fresh air in was actually a good idea, and even more so when Dick wrapped up the remainder of Dutch cheese in its paper and then in the scarf and put it away in his musette bag. Outside of the window, an orange sheet fluttered in the wind, firmly pinned to the clothing line.

“Burn the scarf,” Nix recommended, moving out of the window frame. “Don’t bother washing it. Where’s Harry, by the way?”

“Next door. I think he’s asleep already.”

“Uh-huh. Clutching a photo of Kitty to his chest, no doubt.”

“No doubt,” Dick smiled, but the smile slowly drained from his face. He unscrewed the cap of his canteen, taking a few much-needed sips of water, and Nix’s hand reflexively hovered towards the pocket with the hip flask. “News of the advance?” Dick asked.

Nix put his hand away, stalling the urge. “The good news is that the other half of the British offensive decided to join the war. Not so good news, we had to send in the 505th to clear up their landing zones.”

“Overrun? Already?” Dick asked under his breath.

Nix nodded gravely. “Not much of an element of surprise left, what with the Dutch throwing a party to alert every Kraut in Holland that they’re having guests and the XXX Corps stopping for high tea in the middle of the advance.”

Dick scoffed. The two of them had looked at the Tommies disembarking and setting up the kettle next to their tanks, and then they’d looked at each other, blinking like they were the victims of some sort of shared hallucination. It was hard to believe they were stopping already. Nix for one would have gladly admitted to succumbing to sunstroke, if it could have made that toe-curling display of ineptitude vanish into thin air.

“Up north?” Dick asked, with a small frown.

“We’re holding Nijmegen for now, but no progress. The Krauts are getting reinforcements.”

Dick rubbed a hand over his face, pushing his hair flat against the top of his head in a slow swiping motion, yet managing to leave it mostly unscathed when the hand moved down to his nape.

“What a joke,” he murmured bitterly. He grabbed his toothbrush and paste from his bag and went to wash the cheese taste out of his mouth.

When he came back he stopped at the door for a moment and looked at Nix, a full attentive look, appraising for the first time the other’s presence and the bag sitting on the floor, and Nix knew exactly what was going through his head. 

This was not France. They were past certain things, now, past Dick asking him why he was not staying at headquarters and Nix pretending it was all about keeping himself entertained. If Dick still chose to brush off the old script Nix would play his part, and gladly, never one to disappoint. But Dick didn’t. His gaze skated over Nix’s body and fell on the cot where Dick’s sleeping bag lay unrolled.

“I’ll find myself a room befitting of my status,” Nix proposed, a lame joke, but Dick considered without a trace of a smile that there were no rooms left. Nix believed him: it was a tiny building, tucked away in a narrow alley which connected directly to the main road, a sound strategic choice but not exactly a spacious abode. Coming in, he’d waved at the resident family—mother, father, and two young kids—as they huddled for the night in the master bedroom.

“I can bunk together with Harry,” he offered.

“That room’s even smaller,” Dick argued, as if comfort was the main point here. He bit his lower lip. Out of all the things Nix hated about Dick giving him the sack, the awkwardness was up there in the top three.

Dick finally shook himself, got on his feet and unfurled his long body upwards, knees popping one after another like fireworks. “Come on. I’ll take the floor.”

“Nah, you’re already set up,” Nix objected, freeing his bedroll from its straps, and Dick didn’t insist.

The room was so small that, once the sleeping bag was unrolled on the floor, there was barely any space left to walk. Nix sat down and untied his boots, groaning with pleasure when the first one came off. Dick did the same, more quietly. Neither actually went inside his bag; Dick got only his feet in, and Nix just lay on top of his, using his musette bag as a pillow. He propped it up so that it would not just support his head, but also shield it from the edge of the rusty cot, which was inches away from his face.

It was almost no time at all before the sky, already past sunset and cloudy, turned dark, and the shadows cast by the pitiful sliver of new moon lengthened inside the room.

Nix couldn’t sleep. Every time he thought he was almost there, Dick rolled around, setting off a concert of squeaks and creakings.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he mumbled after maybe the tenth time that he’d been jerked awake by the noise.

Dick sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

Nix closed his eyes and gave it another shot, but the short exchange had woken him up for good. In the restored silence he could hear Dick’s stillness and his careful breathing, the way it sounded regular and controlled but not quite as peaceful as in slumber. He tried not to focus on it, but after a while the slight obsessiveness of his night brain kicked in and it made the intake and release of air from Dick’s lungs all he could hear, like a ticking clock or a dripping faucet, rhythmic enough that it should have lulled him to sleep but it didn’t.

There was something else, too. Nix took the flask and hated how clearly the metallic scraping of the cap echoed in the silence, how big of a deal it made it seem that he needed a drop of something to put his thoughts—and by extension himself—to sleep. He swallowed carefully, almost unconsciously trying to keep it down, but it still sounded too loud to his own ears. What the hell, he thought, in for a dime, and tipped the flask to let the whiskey wash his mouth properly, all the way to his back teeth and the sensitive sides of his tongue.

Dick turned his head, barely a movement at all, but the ancient cot announced it with a soft squeak. Nix looked back and for a long moment they just stared at each other, uncertain what the next move was.

Nix swallowed a residue of whiskey taste that was lingering on the back of his tongue. Something about the quiet and the proximity made him feel bare, like there was no place left to hide all the little secrets he’d collected along the way.

He hugged his chest, feeling his heartbeat pick up.

“There was a guy,” he murmured. “On the LST.”

As he paused, considering burying what he’d just said in a long enough silence that would be almost as good as taking it back, Dick’s voice prodded him gently. “Yes?”

“Yes,” Nix answered, after a moment. “He was quite the gentleman. Bought me a drink first.” He chuckled humorlessly.

Dick rolled carefully on his side, tucking his arm under his head. “What happened?”

“Nothing much. I mean, he wanted to—I don’t know. I don’t know what he wanted to do. Didn’t get that far.”

“So—you didn’t?”

“No.”

He heard Dick release a slow sigh, but couldn’t decipher the emotion behind it.

“You can’t blame a guy for trying, Lew,” Dick said softly. “Take it as a compliment.”

“That’s not what I’m saying at all,” Nix replied, piqued that Dick would think he was whining about it like a goody two-shoes.

“What is it, then?”

Nix hesitated, clutching his fingers around the flask. Dick had a sheepish, understanding expression painted all over his face, though Nix didn’t think he understood, not really. He took a fortifying gulp, and afterwards the words came out more easily.

“I wanted to.”

In the thick, breathy silence that followed his statement, Nix waited with some trepidation for a sign that Dick had caught what he’d said. He’d spoken so low that he wouldn’t have been surprised if the message had gotten lost in the scant twenty inches of air between their faces; he just didn’t know if he’d be able to repeat it. The thought made him vaguely sick.

He lifted the flask once again, but Dick reached out, covering Nix’s fingers with his own. The temperature in the room was dropping fast; Dick’s fingertips were icy cold.

“Lew, it’s okay,” he said softly.

“I don’t know.”

“It is,” Dick replied, more firmly. “I swear.”

“Yeah, but you’d say that, wouldn’t you?”

Dick hesitated for a split second, taken aback. “What do you mean?”

“Dick, c’mon,” Nix murmured. “This is normal for you, this whole—thing. Wanting to bed a six-footer in khakis. If you’d been in my place—”

Dick sounded a little offended. “Well, naturally. My kind never misses a chance.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“It might come as a surprise to you, but bar flirts aren’t exactly my brand.”

“I’m sorry,” Nix said quickly. “That came out wrong. I just meant—Look, you’ve had years to figure it out, and I—Goddamnit.” He’d almost said, _I’ve only ever been with you_, but he’d managed to bite his tongue before he let the words out that would officially mark him the most pathetic creature on earth.

Nix’s right hand had slowly slumped to his chest, bringing the flask and Dick’s fingers down with it. Dick’s hand now gently retreated, stealing the silver bottle without Nix putting up much of a fight.

“Hey,” Nix protested weakly, but Dick propped himself on one elbow against his makeshift pillow, making the cot very angry, and carefully screwed the cap back on.

“You lay it off for tonight, I’ll tell you something,” he proposed.

“Sounds like a shit deal. What kind of something?”

“My first time.”

Nix’s mouth went very dry—not the best prelude to keeping away from drinking for any prolonged amount of time, but then again, _damn_.

“All right,” he said, looking at the disappearing glint of silver as Dick tucked the flask away. “But I get it back first thing tomorrow.”

“Fine,” Dick agreed, and lay back on his cot and didn’t say anything for a while. “It’s not a very good story,” he warned Nix, stalling.

“Get on with it, will you?”

“Yeah, all right.” Dick licked his lips. “So. We grew up together. Our homes are less than half a mile apart. We used to play a lot when we were kids, but then—it changed. I changed. Well, we both did. But I changed more.”

“But you knew?” Nix asked. “Right away?”

“I didn’t _know _anything. I was awkward around girls. Every boy I knew was awkward around girls. Those who weren’t were faking it.”

“The faking I remember,” Nix smiled, and Dick smiled tentatively back.

“At some point I started noticing things. I did a lot of sports. I’d get—thoughts, and then I’d talk to the other boys and there was this whole other set of thoughts that I didn’t get. And it’s not like I could ask someone.”

Nix rolled onto his side, bringing his body closer to the rounded frame of Dick’s cot. Dick’s fingers were wrapped tight around it. Nix raised his hand reflexively.

“Sounds tough,” he murmured, thumb brushing Dick’s knuckles lightly.

“Yeah,” Dick said. His grip relaxed a little under Nix’s touch, but he didn’t let go of the rusty metal bar. “It was a rough few years. But I tried. I really did try.”

Nix couldn’t imagine Dick trying and failing at anything that was humanly attainable through hard work and perseverance, but then again, this had nothing to do with either.

“In the end, I got a little desperate,” Dick confessed. “I thought maybe if I knew for sure, I could live with it. But not knowing, it killed me. I had to do something.”

Nix swallowed around the sudden lump in his throat, tight with the realization that he’d known this already, that he’d been told before and very clearly too, though he had discounted the message because he didn’t like the messenger. He leaned upwards, face climbing higher on his pillow, close enough that he could smell the rusty frame and the toothpaste in Dick’s breath. It seemed to him that Dick likewise leaned closer down, but he didn’t stop speaking, voice pressing on in a murmur.

“I’d never done anything. Neither had my friend. But she—”

“She?” Nix cut him off, dumbfounded.

Dick hesitated. “Yeah?”

“I kind of assumed that it would be a strapping boy from the wrestling club.”

“Well, no. That was later,” Dick smirked ever-so-gently.

Nix felt a laugh itch in his throat but he suppressed it, because Dick would have thought that Nix was laughing at him, and really he only felt like laughing because every time he thought he’d had Dick figured out—most recently, a minute ago—he was reminded that he simply had no clue.

“Sorry. Go on.”

Dick didn’t, not immediately, like the interruption had left him out of steam. Finally he cleared his throat.

“She thought I was in love with her, and I let her believe that,” he said. “And I did love her, just not like that. I knew I didn’t. It just—It seemed like the only thing I could do at the time.”

Nix’s hand, which had never left Dick’s over the railing of the cot, climbed up Dick’s arm and gently wrapped around his shoulder.

“How did it go?”

Dick let out a strained chuckle. “It was horrible. Gross, messy. I had to think about—someone else just to go through with it.”

“Really? Who?”

Even in the dark, Nix could tell that Dick’s face had turned a deep red all the way to his hairline just from the hitch in his voice. “I—Well. I think it was Gary Cooper.”

Funny how this bit should have more or less rightly amused him and didn’t. The thought of Dick soldiering on with the poor girl, hating every second of it and all the while clinging to the blurry, vaguely sensual image of a film star, was so sweet and tragic that Nix felt something melt in his chest, leaving him soft and beaten up inside.

“She deserved better,” Dick continued in a whisper. “I was ashamed. That’s not the way I was raised.”

“So you made a mistake,” Nix replied, gently. “You were a kid. Kids mess up all the time. Hundred red roses, remember?”

“It’s not the same. Your—friend was the one who lied to you.”

“What happened to yours?”

“I told her the truth. I couldn’t have her believe that there was something wrong with _her_.” He sighed. “She was very forgiving. She’s married now. We still exchange letters.”

The idea of someone being hurt by Dick Winters and yet finding themselves unable to hate him was somehow very easy to believe. The idea that they’d still want to hang around, unable to walk away from the man, even more so.

His hand scaled Dick’s shoulder and reached for the back of his neck. “I’m happy you told me, you know,” Nix said, brushing the short hair on Dick’s nape.

“I never told anyone.”

Nix’s body leaned forward. “I’m honored. Truly am.”

Dick exhaled brusquely, as if he’d just realized where Nix’s slow approach naturally ended, and put up a token resistance which, if anything, worked as an encouragement.

“Nix—No, come on,” he murmured.

“What, so you can have your way with me whenever you feel a bit off and I can’t?”

Dick’s lips parted and moved, but the first time he tried to speak, no sound came. “I’m a coward,” he finally managed. “I’m sorry.”

“Say that again and I’m gonna slap you,” Nix growled, and then he did what he’d been thinking about incessantly for the past hour or so and kissed him.

Dick breathed out softly, a whiff of hot air grazing Nix’s cheek, and Nix hummed a single throaty sound as he spread his hand over Dick’s nape and pulled him closer. It was an uncomfortable position, propped up on one elbow with Dick towering a good fifteen inches above him, but there was no way Nix could give this up now that he had him, not for anything, certainly not for a little comfort. Dick grabbed the front of Nix’s field jacket and for a moment they hovered dangerously over the edge, bodies pulling at each other to keep their balance, minutely trembling with muscle tension. When Dick parted his lips and his tongue tentatively licked Nix’s bottom lip, Nix knew that he was done for. He pushed his body upwards blindly, mouth still firmly locked on Dick’s, and brought his knee up and over Dick’s thigh, landing half his body weight somewhere in the middle of the cot, which screeched loudly like a nocturnal animal. Nix leaned in, his hard groin pressing into Dick’s thigh, and in response Dick moaned softly, a repressed, delicious little sound that made Nix’s head spin with want and anticipation. He let his hand drop to Dick’s chest, to his taut belly, down between his legs, possessively gripping his hard flesh through the warm fabric of the fatigues.

“Lew—Wait. Stop,” Dick mumbled, and when Nix pretended not to hear he wrapped his fingers firmly around Nix’s wrist and pulled it off his groin.

“I want you,” Nix blurted, drinking in the way Dick’s breath caught at his words. “I want you, okay? All the way.”

He took advantage of Dick’s temporary shock to spread his hand firmly on Dick’s thigh and dig his thumb in, angled so that it would touch Dick’s flesh under the fabric. Dick exhaled sharply.

“That guy, on the ship,” Nix pressed on, in an urgent murmur. “Wanna know why I left? I thought damn, if I’m going to hell for doing it with a man, I know who I want, and it’s not this one.”

“Nix,” Dick whispered, but didn’t continue. He let go of Nix’s wrist and raised both hands to Nix’s head, digging his fingertips in the ruffled locks that had already started to fall whichever way, messing them up even more. The kiss that followed made Nix’s ears ring and his heart beat almost out of his ribcage. Dick retreated slowly, wet lips still connected to Nix’s by a tremulous strand of saliva, fingers still firmly holding Nix’s head in place.

“I need you to get off me,” he said next, with as much calm as one could muster with his erection firmly nested against another man’s. 

Nix’s blood ran cold. 

“You want this,” he gaped. “You fucking want this as much as I do.”

“Whenever have I not wanted you?” Dick replied, sounding pained. “This isn’t about wanting.”

“What do you mean, this isn’t about—”

“Nix,” Dick said again, as if repeating his name could mollify him. “Get off. Please.”

A petty whine pressed to be let out of Nix’s mouth, but he pushed it back with a mighty swallow and collected his limbs, sliding clumsily onto his sleeping bag. Dick sighed heavily in the dark, like he’d got a big load off his shoulders, which probably was what hurt the most.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t live like this,” Dick said, now perfectly in control, a crisp, willful edge to his voice replacing the heated mumblings of a minute before. “For a while I thought I could. But I can’t.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Nix replied, incapable of keeping his frustration from his voice.

“You know what I’m talking about.”

“I have no goddamn clue what you’re talking about. You said you were tired of me, and four months later here we fucking are.”

“I—never said that.”

“Are you kidding me? You said that to my face.”

“I never said I was tired of _you_. Lew, that’s not—And you believed that?”

Nix couldn’t make heads nor tails of this conversation, apart from the fact that Dick was apparently recanting the Talk or at least some of it, and Nix, damn weakling that he was, was starting to feel something dangerously close to hope grip his stomach.

“Tell me again,” he said under his breath. “Tell me what I’m supposed to believe.”

“That I’d either have you for keeps, or not at all,” Dick answered, voice low and measured and gentle like he was explaining calculus to a third grader.

“I—” Nix paused, mouth dry. “I don’t know what that means.”

Dick was quiet at that. He seemed to wait for Nix to say something else, and he waited for a long time in fact, but Nix’s ability to come up with a reasonable reply—or any reply—was gone. When it was clear that nothing would come, Dick rolled off to his side.

“We move out at zero-six-hundred,” he said. “Catch some sleep.”

  
  
  


** _19 September 1944, Tongelre (Eindhoven)_ **

Nix believed in luck. His faith in the Almighty he’d lost track of somewhere along the way between boarding school and adulthood, but luck was different. Luck had placed him at the confluence of two wealthy estates rather than making him, say, the son of a foreman and a housewife in rural Pennsylvania. Luck made him a decent poker player on the nights when he was too distracted or drunk to pay attention, it made girls fall in his lap when other company was unavailable. Luck saw to his continued good health despite a bunch of destructive habits. 

More recently, luck had seen it fit to save his life.

Nix walked up to battalion headquarters on Dick’s side, with his helmet—his lucky helmet—tucked under his arm. Hours after the failed push at Nuenen, Dick had noticed that Nix was still carrying it around and told him to go ask for a new one from the supply officer. Nix had dismissed the suggestion. It was stupid, he knew: a pierced helmet was a liability. But surviving the shot had emboldened him. Dick had pursed his lips and said nothing.

The moment they set foot at headquarters, Nix immediately knew that Strayer was asking for trouble. He didn’t need to see him to know: he just sniffed the air and smelled meat stew, not reheated canned slop with its distinctive tangy note, but real stew made from real meat. Dick bent his neck to the side as if to stretch a stiff muscle, set his shoulders straight and marched on.

Jovial, mixed laughter came through the thick door. A fragment of conversation reached Nix’s ears: “... not exactly a lady, if you know what I mean…” 

Dick dropped the hand that he’d raised with the intention of knocking and instead pushed the handle firmly down.

At the table, Strayer, Horton, and Hester were already more than halfway through their meal. There was wine on the table—not a Château Lafite, surely, but a decent bottle from the looks of it. Nix couldn’t read the tag.

Dick snapped to attention, boots clicking with a frightening crack, and saluted curtly. “Colonel. Major,” he addressed his superiors.

“Ah, Captains,” Strayer said, pulling off a big smile. His normally pale cheeks were blotched red, courtesy of the wine. “Finally. At ease, gentlemen. We were starting to wonder when you two would show up.”

Dick, who’d never once in his military career been late for anything, clenched his jaw at the not so subtle implication that he’d been wasting his time. 

“Sir, I had to see to it that the men were billeted properly. Captain Nixon had a rendezvous with Dutch agents from the line.”

“All right, all right,” Strayer said magnanimously. “No court-martial this time. Am I right?” he joked.

“Yes, sir,” Dick replied dryly.

“Sit down, then,” Strayer said, gesturing at the empty seats. It was a big oak table with finely elaborate chairs, set for eight people though only three were using it. Strayer poured generously into the empty glass next to him. “Have a drink.”

“No, thank you, sir,” Dick said sharply.

“Bob, Captain Winters doesn’t drink,” Horton reminded him.

“Right,” Strayer said. “Nixon does. You haven’t gone dry on us, have you, Nixon?” He looked hopefully at Nix. Nix’s mouth was parched and tasted like dust, but he locked his hands behind his back and didn’t move.

“Thank you, sir. I’m all right,” he said, catching an amused look from Hester.

“Sir,” Dick cut in, “I’d like to give you my report now.”

Strayer nodded, already looking less cheerful than a minute before, but resolutely clinging to his cheery attitude as if it could keep up the mood of the party in the face of what was definitely a gathering storm. Nix pitied him: he’d seen tougher men withstand the blunt of Dick’s anger and leave bent in half like a fire poker in a strongman’s act.

“Go ahead, Captain.”

“We ran smack into an advancing armored column,” Dick said sharply. “We took a beating like we’ve never seen. Fifteen casualties, four dead. My best platoon leader is looking at three weeks recovery. The Krauts blew up four Cromwells, and the British had three times our casualties. Sir.”

Strayer got suddenly very pale. He dropped his fork with a clang, while Horton rubbed his face in dismay and Hester more or less jumped to his feet, chair scraping loudly against the floor. Hester walked out of the room in a hurry, forgetting to excuse himself and salute, but the other two didn’t pay him mind.

The temperature in the room had dropped. Nix regarded Strayer’s confusion with a vague sense of schadenfreude, though not entirely devoid of sympathy. He was not a bad man, nor a totally inept leader; his grasp of military strategy was sound and he could read people even better than he could read maps. At times, he was capable of truly inspired decisions. But he got easily distracted, and even more so under duress; when the stress levels got too high he wavered and wobbled and sought refuge in inconsequential little things, like wine and beef stew in the middle of the most poorly planned operation of the whole war.

“What about the intelligence? How did we not know about the tanks?” Strayer replied, eyes moving accusingly from Dick to Nix.

“All due respect, sir, the intel is crap,” Nix snorted. “The British network is in shambles. The Dutch are using kids as spies. The _agents _I met earlier were twelve and thirteen respectively. And the radio equipment up at Command is breaking up all the time; more often than not we get radio silence. We’re on our own.”

“This is unacceptable,” Strayer replied, coloring up again, this time with indignation. “Regiment must be informed right away. We cannot be expected to advance in these conditions.” He took the napkin from his lap and threw it on the table, getting on his feet with almost as much energy as Hester had. “Nixon, with me. We are driving up to regiment.”

“Yes, sir,” Nix said, throwing Dick a glance that he hoped conveyed at least a vague reassurance. He had planned on going anyway, to gather some information and share the Dutch intel with the regiment S-2, unreliable as it was. Perhaps he’d be able to find confirmations or discount some of it. Most importantly, he had hopes of figuring out what Sink expected of 2nd Battalion by cutting out the middleman.

They were already at the door when Dick’s voice reached them like a whiplash, cold and impersonal the way he only managed to sound when he was out of his mind with fury.

“Sir, your orders.”

Strayer halted on his step and turned around, frowning. “I—want a full report, of course. And then—What is it that you’re doing right now?”

“We’re holding Nuenen by the skin of our teeth. I’ve got scouts keeping an eye on the roads in and out of town.”

“Keep doing that.”

Strayer walked out first. Dick’s fists were clenched like those of a rebellious child, his cheeks flushed. He and Nix exchanged a long, gloomy look before Nix followed Strayer out of the room. He didn’t give a damn that Major Horton could all too clearly read their mute conversation. Any time he felt like stepping up and joining the war effort, he’d be more than welcome.

He was back in the village late at night. He went to look for Dick right away, certain that he would find him up, awaiting news from regiment, but he wasn’t at the billet he shared with Welsh. Harry was there, still awake and in fairly high spirits despite all the shit they’d been served. That was a trait of Harry’s personality that Nix couldn’t understand and secretly envied even as he openly dismissed it. Harry called it his Irish cheer; Nix called it Harry’s Irish idiocy. It wasn’t like Irish history had been exactly a bag of laughs.

“He said he’d go take a walk,” Harry informed him. “_Clear his head_, were his words.”

“Uh-uh,” Nix hummed, pulling out the hip flask and finding it dangerously light. He shook it gently, gauging the content in sips and guessing it’d be empty before sunrise. He thought of Dick’s footlocker in the next room, thirsty already, but the idea of opening it without permission was undignified and the idea of asking for permission made him feel queasy. Still, he mutely handed the flask to Harry when he saw the other man looking.

Harry thanked him and perfunctorily wet his lips before giving it back.

“He’s been in a mood all day,” he observed airily, as if to make a conversation. “Wonder why.”

“Because this operation is a joke?” Nix scoffed. “Because our men are dropping left and right like flies?”

“Yeah, maybe,” Harry admitted. “But he was holding up okay when I went to sleep, and this morning he was impossible.”

‘Impossible’ was not a word he’d often heard applied to Dick Winters. Granted, he could be demanding, and certainly brusque at times, especially in front of obvious displays of incompetence or laziness, but he never let his temper get the best of him. As for that particular day, by the time Nix had let himself saunter close to Dick’s personal space again, it had been almost noon, and whatever shitty mood had come over Dick, at that point it was perfectly justified by the disastrous progress of the push.

But none of that had to do with what Harry was saying. Harry looked at him with a suddenly piercing gaze and Nix had to wonder exactly how thin the inner walls of the house were.

“We got up at four this morning,” he shrugged, keeping at bay the sticky panic that had started to gather under his armpits. “Pissed me off all right.”

Harry regarded him for a moment longer, then let a good-natured smile surface on his lips. It was the teeth, Nix realized. The small gap between Harry’s front teeth made him look younger and friendly to the point of harmless. 

“That’s your bedtime, isn’t it?”

“Even later on a good day.” Nix tucked away his hip flask, collected his helmet and shook away the uneasiness. It was not like he had anything to worry about. Worry was for misbehavers, and Nix hadn’t been misbehaving for months. “Night, Harry.”

“Night, buddy.”

He’d just set foot outside when a squadron of Stukas came roaring over his head, passed Tongelre’s airspace and headed west. Nix stopped and watched them go, his natural instinct to duck for cover superseded by the realization that they were flying way too high for him to be their target. And sure enough, when the blasts started resonating they were too far to be a real concern, though they were still horribly close. Heinkels came next, a whole lot of them, chased by a reverse rain of British ack-acks. Nix’s breath caught. He walked off to the end of the road, breaking into a run halfway through, suddenly in a hurry to see, to know for sure, and didn’t stop until he reached the viewpoint. 

A sliver of sky on the west, just above the horizon, had already turned orange and pink in a mock sunrise. Dick was standing there, M1 hanging from his shoulder, helmet under his arm. He threw Nix a cursory glance when he heard his steps, then turned back.

Nix’s first thought was for the Dutch women with shaved heads. He hoped that they’d be allowed into the air-raid shelters, because the idea that they might not be—that someone in Eindhoven might see it a fit recompense for sleeping with the Germans that they die under German fire—made him feel like it was all pointless: their being there, Easy’s four dead, his fruitless attempts to make sense of maps and troop movements and coded messages. _They all may as well burn_, he thought coldly. _At least we’d get to leave this mess._

“They’re bombing Eindhoven,” Dick said, with a catch in this voice. Spelled out like that it was easier, Nix considered: a line in a report, a simple fact that could be contained in a short sentence. It was still happening but would soon be a part of history. They’re bombing Eindhoven; they bombed Eindhoven.

“Yeah.”

Dick turned slowly on his heels, hugging the helmet with both arms. He walked past Nix, and when he talked, his voice dripped exhaustion and something else, something tragically close to defeat.

“Come on, Nix. We’ll dig in for the night.”

Sarcasm burned in Nix’s throat like bad liquor. He held it down for a moment, but then what was the point. “Won’t be waving so many orange flags at us tomorrow,” he spat, because somehow articulating his bitterness made him feel better, and preceded Dick down the road.

He’d taken maybe three steps when Dick grabbed his arm. Nix turned around, puzzled, in time to see the next wave of orange blasts shine around Dick’s head like a bizarre halo. 

Dick mutely pulled him off the road, behind the cover of an Army truck parked nearby. He raised his left hand and his thumb easily found the tender spot on Nix’s forehead, not even a scab yet. It hurt at the touch, but Nix didn’t protest. In the few seconds of quiet between the drop of the next bomb and the next whistle of the anti-aircraft missiles, he heard Dick take a difficult breath.

“I don’t know what I would do,” Dick whispered. “I don’t.”

“Hey, it’s all right,” Nix said quickly, tenderness punching him in the gut with a soft blow. He touched his right hand to Dick’s cheek, brushing the spot where smooth skin turned into stubble. “I’m all right.” He leaned in, placing a kiss on the very same spot. “It’s not even a Purple Heart, for Christ’s sake,” he grumbled in mock indignation, lips grazing Dick’s cheek.

“You can have mine,” Dick promised while the bombs went off again, cupping his hand around Nix’s nape.

“Your…?” Nix’s lips wandered close to the shell of Dick’s ear.

“Purple Heart.”

Nix’s mouth found its way to Dick’s throat, to his steadfast pulse, latching onto it in a long, strange kiss until he could feel Dick’s heartbeat in his own eyeballs. The collar of Dick’s field jacket rose against Nix’s face when Dick moved and Nix was all at once overpowered by Dick’s scent, its sweet and tangy and sour notes. He got a little drunk on it, a little giddy, and he thought that that must be the way Dick felt on those rare occasions when he looked drunk without touching a drop.

“It’s a funny name, isn’t it,” he rambled, nuzzling Dick’s Adam’s apple. “Like a condition. _‘I’m 4F. I’ve got a purple heart.’_”

“It sounds serious.” Dick’s fingers threaded through Nix’s hair.

“It is. It is very serious. Your heart gets squishy and soft and you can’t think straight.”

“I think I’ve got it, then,” Dick murmured.

Their positions shifted minutely. Nix dropped his helmet and was rewarded by the twin thud of Dick’s own meeting the same fate. Slowly, their arms closed around each other in an embrace so tight that Nix couldn’t breathe, but he didn’t care. 

“You can have it,” Dick mumbled to his hair. “My purple heart.”

Nix’s chest felt impossibly tight from his stomach to the back of his mouth, like someone was squeezing all his organs into fresh pulp. He breathed in and his chest expanded, oxygen carrying Dick’s words all the way up to his brain.

“Dick, I—”

“It’s okay,” Dick said quickly. “I’m not asking for anything.”

Nix pulled back from Dick’s neck, a whiff of fresh air gently slapping his face. “What the fuck does that even mean,” he muttered under his breath, the words harsh but delivered in the softest voice he could manage. “You say stuff like this sometimes, you—drop these bombs on me and then you retreat. I’m a mess on a good day, okay? I’ve got no clue what you mean by all that.”

Dick scrunched his face up in a pained expression. “Sometimes it feels like, if I speak too loud you’ll run away.”

“Jesus, you’re the one who ran away. I’ve been here the whole time.”

“Lewis,” Dick replied, gently but firmly, “you’ve been steadily driving me crazy for two years.”

Nix felt the blow, though it was miles above the belt. He hadn’t thought about it in months—how impossible he’d been ever since that first night in Dick’s bunk at OCS, how he’d been blowing hot and cold about the whole affair for the best part of two years. Somehow, while licking his own, fresher wounds he had allowed himself to forget.

“I’m sorry,” Nix said now, honestly. “I didn’t mean to.”

“I know.” Dick let out a small sigh and disentangled his fingers from Nix’s hair, where they had happily remained for the whole time. His other arm, which had wrapped around Nix’s midsection, dropped to the side. “Don’t worry,” Dick smiled crookedly. “Just because I want something, it doesn’t mean that I expect it.”

“Don’t say that,” Nix replied, refusing to let go, clinging to the moment because he knew that once it was over, there was a chance that they might end up worse than before.

“Come on,” Dick murmured, gently pushing Nix’s hands away. He took a step back and bent to collect his helmet from the ground.

“Let’s go back,” he said, voice shedding any trace of emotion to default to a tired drawl. “I wanna hear how it went up at regiment.”

He took a few steps off the shadow of the truck, back to the road, and only then he realized that Nix wasn’t following.

Crouching on his heels, Nix touched his fingers to the two dents on the side of his helmet, the entrance and exit holes of the bullet, and for the first time since he’d picked it up from the ground right after the shot, he didn’t find it amusing.

“Just throw it away,” Dick said, voice too firm for it to be called a prayer, though Nix of course knew better. “Here, take mine.”

“You’re in a very generous mood tonight,” Nix observed, not moving. Nix saw the other focus on him sharply, eyes shining eerily from the light of the blasts.

Nix thrust his thumb and ring finger into the holes and lifted the helmet as if it were a bowling ball, taking a look inside. He considered saying something, but the words wouldn’t come out.

He got on his feet, sore muscles responding slowly, making him feel stiff all over. He walked up to Dick and took the helmet from the other man’s hand. Turning around, he adjusted his grip on his own helmet—his lucky, lucky helmet—and threw it with a swing into the open back of the truck, where it fell with a heavy clang.

He raised his now-free hand to the side of Dick’s neck and brushed Dick’s jaw with his thumb. 

“Talk tomorrow?”

He waited for Dick’s small nod, then gave the other’s shoulder a squeeze and walked away, new helmet in hand. He was trembling all over, microscopic muscle spasms shaking him from head to toe. He steadied himself with the last drop of Vat 69.

Nix believed in luck, and most days he’d call himself a lucky man. After all, luck had saved his life and got him Dick Winters.

That didn’t mean that he was going to stroll into combat with a pierced helmet or believe that Dick would tag along indefinitely just because of Nix’s pretty eyes.

He just hoped that he’d be able to find a way to make him stick around for a little while longer.

  
  
  


** _30 September 1944, Uden_ **

It would forever remain a mystery how Dick had gotten his hands on a bottle of Dutch schnapps—a tall, green, medicinal-looking thing that would have been at home on a pharmacy shelf. Nix suspected that the Van Oers, the family who’d offered their house to Easy Company as command post, had something to do with it, but Dick never confirmed.

Nix had been bemoaning the dwindling of his stash for days. On D-Day plus thirteen, all that remained of it was a finger of Vat 69 in his flask and an unappealing half bottle of gin he’d won at poker from a British officer. 

“Are you going to drink it or not?” Dick asked, clicking away on his typewriter. He looked up at the paper, frowned, and nudged the piston back to correct a mistake.

Nix looked at the gin with distaste. He didn’t have anything particularly against the drink: a good G&T was a decent party starter. But it was a cheap bottle he’d won, and quite frankly he’d been soldiering through half of it only to stretch out his meager Vat reserve for as long as possible.

“Yes,” he answered, but then didn’t.

Dick looked up briefly and smiled before going back to typing in that painful hunt-and-peck style of his. 

“Leave it, then.”

“I don’t have anything left,” Nix replied—a touch melodramatic, perhaps, but then again, war is hell.

“I have something for you.”

Nix perked his ears like a hound dog who’s heard a squeak, and hated himself right away for such an obvious reaction. “_Something_ as in—?”

“As in, let me finish this report first.”

Nix sighed and put the gin back in Dick’s footlocker, under a pile of folded clothes. He laid himself down on Dick’s cot.

_Click, click. Clack. Click._

“Forget Berlin, we’ll still be here by Christmas.”

“Yeah, don’t worry, I’ve forgotten all about Berlin.”

“You know, it’d be much faster if you dictated it to me,” Nix proposed.

“Did you sign up for typing classes at Yale?”

“I’m a jack of all trades, my friend.”

The corner of Dick’s mouth curled up, but he didn’t stop typing. Presently he pressed on a full stop and unrolled the sheet of paper from the typewriter. He then made a show of very slowly reading his very short report, and only when Nix let out a frustrated groan he finally clucked his tongue, put the sheet aside and stood up.

“All right. Let’s go.”

“Wait, wasn’t that urgent?” Nix asked, pointing at the desk.

Dick looked back where Nix was pointing. “No, it’s for tomorrow. I wanted to get it done.”

Nix rolled his eyes and followed him outside. It hadn’t escaped him that Dick had taken his bag, and the farther they got from Dick’s billet and the closer to Nix’s—because that was clearly where they were headed—the more Nix’s attention was drawn to the brown-grey lump hanging on Dick’s side. He was thirsty. Damn, he was thirsty. He’d been bored for days, since they’d been posted in Uden to hold the northernmost tip of the useless fifty-mile long strip that was all Market Garden had won the Allies. Long, dry days and nights full of feverish activity he could stand, but boredom made him thirsty as hell. 

Nix liked having his own billet. Be it a remnant of a very comfortable life or a failure to properly adjust to the lack of privacy dictated by the Army, he would generally try to get his own place, or failing that, a separate room. With his sleep cycle more and more messed up, he’d turn in whenever he felt it was the right time and not bother too many people because of it.

The billet in question was an abandoned two-storey house with enough rooms to host the whole battalion headquarters company, but half-rotten and draftsy as hell, which made it too cold at night. It suited Nix perfectly, because it was a stone’s throw from both battalion and Easy’s CP, close enough that nobody would find exception with battalion staff hanging out alone, and as for the cold, Nix generally had his ways of keeping his body warm, at least until he ran out.

“Happy birthday,” Dick said, pulling the bottle out of his bag. He smiled a little hesitantly and added a word of warning: “It was all I could find. I don’t know if this is something you like.”

“Only one way to find out,” Nix announced chirpily, taking the bottle with a measured gesture in hope of not looking too eager.

It looked like mouthwash, if mouthwash had come in pint-sized formats, but when Nix unscrewed the cap it smelled herbal and sweet and strong enough to tickle the back of his throat promisingly. He took a first sip and the flavor erupted in his mouth, with a peppery start and a mellow, sugary finish. Not Nix’s drink of choice if he’d had any choice, but too good for the time and place.

“It’s good,” he said offering the bottle, but Dick leaned in to smell it like a wary cat and shook his head. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” 

Cross-legged on Nix’s bedroll, Dick took a look around Nix’s sleeping quarters. A frayed, discolored orange sheet that had seen more patriotic days hung from a shifty railing, providing an illusion of privacy. Some of Nix’s scarce belongings, mostly Army equipment—a pair of binoculars, a plain map—were scattered around. The whole place smelled moldy, even more so when the curtain was drawn, partly blocking out the perennial draft.

“Not the worst place, this one,” was Dick’s polite assessment.

At this point they had slept in so many makeshift billets and holes in the ground that the memories were starting to get mixed. Nix roughly divided them into places with a roof and places without. Dick looked around and Nix looked at Dick, lips on the mouth of the bottle for a second, aromatic taste, and wondered which of the many worse places he was reminiscing about.

“Remember what you were doing a year ago?” Dick asked, answering Nix’s unspoken question.

“Sure,” Nix said, the cheerfulness triggered by the booze suggesting a humorous rebuttal (_I was doing you_), which he wisely kept bottled up. “That was a good one. Not enough alcohol, if you ask me, but I see you’ve learned your lesson in the meantime.” He smiled charmingly, raising the bottle in a mock toast before giving it a third kiss.

“Truth is, you’re not much for company when you’re sober,” Dick smiled back.

“Now that’s a filthy lie and you know it.”

“It is,” Dick conceded easily. “What about two years ago?”

“’42? That would’ve been Toccoa, right?” He paused. It had been the day of the Junior Olympics. He didn’t remember much of his solitary celebrations, though he distinctly remembered being pissed at Dick for something else and twisting it into being pissed at Dick for forgetting about his birthday—a completely inane argument since, short of sneaking into the archives to check Nix’s records, how was Dick supposed to even know when his birthday was?

“Definitely more booze, that time,” Nix declared, licking his lips. He was warming up to the taste of the liquor, and warming up in general thanks to it. He was already starting to feel the familiar happy tingle in his head.

“I’ve been wondering. Were you two already—You and Moore. Were you—?”

“Were we what?” Dick prodded gently.

Nix shrugged. “Fucking?”

Dick frowned slightly at the word. “Why are you thinking of this now?”

“You got me thinking of that night. I spent it wondering. Most of it, anyway.”

“About that?”

Nix looked at Dick’s dry lips and licked his own again, reflexively. “Yeah,” he admitted.

“Well, we weren’t,” Dick answered softly.

Nix nodded and lifted the bottle. “Thought maybe you were. Went back and forth about it a few times, and I couldn’t make up my mind.” He shook his head and brought the mouth of the bottle to his lips, listening to the comforting sloshing of the liquor. “God, that was a shitty night.”

“I’m sorry,” Dick said uselessly, though Nix suspected it to be precisely true. It was Dick’s style, wasn’t it, going about being sorry for things like that, and two years after the fact, no less.

Nix waved the apology away. “What for? Though if you _really _want to make it up to me, not that I’m saying you _should_—” He gently shook the bottle in front of Dick’s face.

“Sacrifice my liver to make amends? Seems a little tribal.”

“Just a sip. Don’t be dramatic,” Nix replied, bumping Dick’s shoulder.

Dick’s hand closed around the bottle. “All right, then,” he said. “We’ll call it a second birthday gift.”

“I thought the Winterses didn’t do double gifts.”

“You’re already spoiled. Not much I can do to change that.”

Nix smiled happily. He knew it was mostly the alcohol, the knowledge of it being there even more than its chemical effect, but he hadn’t felt this good in a while. “Drink the booze, Dick.”

Dick didn’t look as happy, but he’d said he would do it, and once he said he’d do something you could bet he would. He latched his mouth to the bottle and let some liquor roll over his tongue, putting the bottle down with his mouth still full. He made a tight, painful face as he forced down the burning drink and let out a single hacking sound to clear his throat, but didn’t cough.

“Happy birthday to me,” Nix grinned, wrapping his fingers around Dick’s on the bottle. Dick’s cheeks were a nice shade of pink, though Nix would never know if it was the liquor or the slight embarrassment of being seen at a disadvantage. Giving in to the euphoria, Nix leaned in, smelling the alcohol and the spice mix in Dick’s breath, and placed a kiss on the other’s mouth. Dick’s bottom lip was oddly sweet when Nix’s tongue darted out to steal a taste.

He pulled back, somewhat surprised by the complete lack of resistance, and raised his free hand to cradle Dick’s cheek. “What,” he asked softly, “you not telling me to fuck off this time?”

Dick rested his face against Nix’s hand, eyelids fluttering closed for a moment. When he spoke he sounded exhausted, almost to the point of bitter. 

“No matter what I do, we always end up here. You wanna do it? Let’s do it. God knows I want to.”

“Not like this,” Nix replied, recoiling like he’d been slapped.

“Like what?”

“Like—I’m forcing you.” Nix wondered if Dick would have done anything at all if Nix hadn’t brought it up in the first place.

“I just said I want to.”

“Not like this,” Nix repeated, uncomfortably.

Dick looked down at his long legs stretched half on the bedroll and half on the floor. They’d kicked off their shoes first thing before sitting down and taken off their sweaty socks, tucking them into the shoes. Nix didn’t look forward to putting his boots back on any time soon.

“Maybe I should go,” Dick mumbled.

“Wait,” Nix said, touching Dick’s sleeve. “Stay a moment, okay? Don’t be a fucking tease all the time.”

“I’m not—” Dick started, affronted.

“Shut up. Lie down.” He crawled over and pushed Dick’s legs out of the way until they were both lying parallel on the sleeping bag, Dick close to the wall, Nix with half of his back on the dusty floor. He grabbed Dick’s musette bag and stuck it under their heads as a pillow. “There. Better.” He took a last swig from the bottle, which he hadn’t let go of during the whole maneuver, and placed it carefully down onto the floor.

“Lew,” Dick sighed, turning on his side to face him.

“Enough with the ‘Lew’s and the ‘Nix’s and the sighing,” Nix grumbled. “I’ve given it some thought, okay? Hear me out.”

Dick watched him carefully, eyes a dark grey in the dim light filtering into Nix’s alcove.

Nix swallowed a sugary lump of spit and cleared his throat. God knew he was not afraid of many things, but he felt his palms ooze sweat in anticipation of what he was going to say now.

“Until the war’s over.” He saw Dick’s eyelashes blink in surprise and immediately felt out of his depth. Maybe he should have prepared this more carefully; it had sounded much better in his mind. “I know it’s not much,” he continued quickly, “though at this rate we might be looking at another five years,” he added, a floppy joke which landed nowhere. “But we could be blown to pieces tomorrow, and look, I don’t give a damn if it’s me going first, but if it’s you, then—” He trailed off, fighting the sudden lump in his throat. Damn, he was getting sentimental. A sentimental old fruit.

“Nix, I can’t do this again,” Dick said.

“_This_,” Nix objected pointedly, “we’ve never done before.”

Dick looked confused. “Then I don’t know what you’re offering.”

“It’s not that hard,” Nix murmured, rolling up on his side. He threaded his fingers through the thin hair on Dick’s temples and then upwards, through the thicker locks. “Everything. Every goddamn thing. Unconditional surrender. Roll in the tanks and call me Poland.”

Dick chuckled in disbelief, which Nix supposed was preferable to the stunned silence he’d braced for. There was a strain to it, like Dick was forcing the air out, but at this stage Nix was mostly inclined to take it as a good sign.

“You,” Dick murmured in a flummoxed voice, “will be the death of me.”

“I’d still take that over a bullet,” Nix declared, feeling Dick’s fingers wrap firmly around his shoulder.

“A bullet’s faster.”

“You want fast?” Nix replied, cupping the back of Dick’s head and edging closer. “I can do fast. Hell, that’s all I can do right now.”

Dick’s eyes fell downwards for a moment, then deliberately climbed back up to Nix’s face. He bit his lip, wavering. “Until the end of the war,” he repeated, weighing the words as if saying them out loud could give him a measure of how long that indefinite time was.

“Or until one of us steps on a mine.” Nix let his hand wander over Dick’s side and down to Dick’s thigh. He hooked the hamstring right above the back of Dick’s knee and pulled it over his hip, sliding home between Dick’s legs. Warmth radiated irresistibly through Dick’s clothes. Nix buried his face in the other’s neck, arousal washing over him like a hot shower. “Though I’d still fuck you if you were a leg short. Easier to handle, I reckon.”

“Nix,” Dick breathed, pushing his knee all the way to the floor and rolling over to straddle Nix’s thighs. “Shut up now.”

The kiss was hot and hungry and heavy with promise. Dick slipped his tongue into Nix’s mouth as he rolled his hips into Nix’s groin, hard-on sliding smoothly into the fold of Nix’s thigh. Nix’s hands shot up of their own volition to the front of Dick’s fatigue pants, pawing blindly at the belt. He’d barely managed to unbuckle it when Dick suddenly stood up, brazenly walking away from the hot mess he’d just made of Nix.

“Dick, I swear to God—” Nix groaned.

“The lock’s busted,” came the reply. “All right, then.” Nix heard the chair scrape on the floor as it was dragged over to block the door, then Dick popped up once again by the ragged orange sheet. He pulled it shut, nearly making the whole damn thing fall off, and stood in front of it with his belt hanging open, a visible bulge in his pants, and a thoughtful expression on his face.

“Come here,” Nix said under his breath, feeling his heartbeat pick up at the absurd beauty of the sight, but Dick didn’t comply. He took off his jacket first, threw it on the floor, untucked his shirt from his pants and unbuttoned it before chucking it the same way. The carelessness was so atypical that it made Nix blink, but in a moment Dick was back to straddling Nix’s legs, and any concern that wasn’t related to getting most of Dick’s skin out of his clothes fled Nix’s mind.

He thrust his palms under Dick’s undershirt, pushing it up over his ribcage, then went back to opening Dick’s pants. Dick was doing the same: nimble, practiced fingers making quick work of all buttons until Nix’s chest was peeled out of his outer layers and his field pants hung open, erection visible through the two hems of fabric and still wrapped in the cotton underwear.

Dick pulled Nix’s cock out of the underpants slit and bent to take it in his mouth, but Nix squirmed uncomfortably.

“I haven’t showered,” he said. “It’s okay, come up here.”

Eyes downcast, Dick gave Nix’s cock a gentle pull, gathering Nix’s foreskin in his fist before letting it roll slowly down. He looked up, watching the arousal color Nix’s cheeks in what Nix assumed was a vaguely pleasing sight, at least judging from Dick’s smile. 

“Nix,” he said firmly, “there’s no way I’m not doing this.”

Nix licked his lips, mouth dry with anticipation. “Yes, sir.”

It was an intense but brief affair, a fact Nix felt he’d given Dick ample warnings of. Four goddamn months, and four minutes was all it took to unravel him. Dick worked him expertly, no playing around, no teasing; long, deep pulls in and out of the welcoming heat of his mouth interspersed with gentle sucking, and when Nix felt dangerously close and muttered, “Fuck, fuck,” under his breath, Dick took him all in and held him fast until the last drop was spent.

Dick pulled back, mouth wet and pink with the friction, and wiped his chin on the back of his hand. In the fuzzy cloud of his afterglow, Nix heard Dick’s stubble scrape lightly on the skin of his hand and imagined Dick’s face buried deep between his legs, mouth undoing him in quite a different way, stubble roughing up all his most tender flesh. Maybe next time, he thought, secure and centered in his post-orgasmic daze.

“God, I’ve missed you,” Nix breathed after Dick climbed up his body for a long, filthy kiss that turned the rest of his body to jelly.

Dick laughed softly. “Have you now?” He leaned over Nix’s body to grab the bottle and under Nix’s dazed eyes he freely swallowed a gulp of liquor.

“Yep. Still don’t get it,” Dick muttered, making a face.

“It’s an acquired taste,” Nix explained, stealing the bottle. He grinned impishly. “You don’t see me criticizing _your_ drink of choice, do you.”

Dick was thick-skinned enough about the whole sex business that he wouldn’t blush at the dirty joke, but then again there wouldn’t have been enough light for the blush to show up properly.

Nix put away the bottle and took Dick’s face in both of his hands, pulling him down for another sweet and sour kiss, and maneuvered him so that he could smoothly roll on top of him with a push of his hips. That failed, and spectacularly so. His lower body muscles, soft and complacent after the pleasure, refused to put in the hard work, and Nix had to prop himself up on his elbow and push his whole body over. The momentum brought his free arm in a collision course with the schnapps bottle, which tipped over and started spilling on the floor.

“No, no, no,” Nix muttered, diving forward to pick it up. Some of the green liquor had made a puddle on the floorboards and turned a dark brown. “Goddamnit,” he cursed, with feeling.

Dick started laughing under him, silent spasms shaking his belly and making it bounce against Nix’s body.

“It’s not funny,” Nix grumbled, crawling on his knees to carefully place the bottle out of accidental reach. The cap was lost, either buried between the boards or hiding somewhere in the dark.

“Sure is,” Dick replied, running his hands on Nix’s thighs. “Hey, Nix—”

“God, it smells like a whorehouse in here.”

“Nix.”

“What?”

“Do you mind?” He rolled his hips upwards, his erection pressing demandingly between Nix’s buttcheeks.

“Yeah, yeah. What’s the hurry?”

Nix rearranged his body so that he was sitting back on his heels between Dick’s knees and swiftly pulled down Dick’s trousers and underwear until they were hugging Dick’s thighs. He would’ve liked to have him fully naked, but he didn’t dare. They were most certainly alone for now, but battalion could send up a runner to smoke either of them out at any time. And this particular sight was not terribly bad either.

He bent down to place a wet kiss on Dick’s stomach, teasingly making his way down, enjoying how Dick bit off a sigh when the tip of his hard cock grazed Nix’s rough chin, and then just let it out when Nix took him fully in his mouth, the sound accompanied by a tiny, aborted upward push of Dick’s hips.

“I—_ah—_I’ve missed this too,” Dick admitted, pleasure quivering in his voice.

Nix had, too. He ran his hand over Dick’s inner thigh, the pad of his thumb digging in the valley drawn by Dick’s strong muscles, and thought of the few times in the past months when he’d started to bring himself off thinking of Dick going down on him, and the fantasy had morphed without warning into a full role reversal, eventually leaving him spent and unsure of his own desires. 

He looked up, meeting Dick’s eyes, which were fixed on him. So maybe he enjoyed sucking a man’s—_this_ man’s—cock. It may so happen that he was reasonably good at it—good enough, at any rate, to bring out the occasional swear word from Dick Winters’ pristine lips and put a sated smile in its stead. He suckled softly, lips massaging the sensitive ridge at the base of the head until Dick tensed sharply and held his breath in an effort to control himself. He took him back in all the way, letting Dick’s cock press his tongue down and bury itself firmly into his mouth as he pushed Dick over the edge with a couple hard pulls with his fist wrapped at the base. 

When Dick was done coming Nix raised his head, taking in the other man’s ruddy cheeks and chewed bottom lip, and what he felt most of all was a sweet, glowing sense of triumph.

“I think I’m drunk,” Dick mumbled a while later, head heavy on Nix’s chest.

“You’re not drunk.”

“How would you know?”

“You’re a grown-up man. You’re not drunk after two sips.”

Nix ran his fingers idly through Dick’s hair. He wasn’t proper sleepy, not yet, but the sex and the stuffy air made him drowsy. He’d probably wake up later and go out for a walk, while Dick slept the whole night away without so much as turning around once.

“I had a drink,” Dick said softly, “before my first time.”

Nix’s fingertips scratched lightly at Dick’s scalp. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. Kinda ruined it for me.”

“Mm. Bad sex ruins everything,” Nix observed philosophically. 

He closed his eyes, listening to Dick’s breathing as it grew slower and deeper. They’d shared a bed many times, but the only time he could remember them sleeping like this, half on top of each other like kittens huddling for warmth, had been on the troop ship from New York. It had been strange then, waking up pinned down by Dick’s weight, like that small detail somehow made the rest of it worse, but now it felt just nice, normal and soothing like the feeling of Dick’s fine hair sliding softly through his fingers.

“Lew,” Dick said abruptly, voice vibrating low against Nix’s chest.

“Yes?”

“Poland never surrendered.”

Nix let out a soft laugh through his nose, bringing up his free hand from where it lay on the bedroll to cover Dick’s fingers spread over his heart.

“Right. I did, though. Live with it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here we are, at 110k+! As usual, thanks for reading and let me know what you think of this insanity :D


End file.
